


No Soul to Sell

by toomuchplor



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Adoption, Age Difference, Alternate Universe, Childbirth, Dreams, Forgery, Genderbending, M/M, Mpreg, Other, Pregnancy, Surreal, Teen Pregnancy, Unplanned Pregnancy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-11-02
Updated: 2011-11-02
Packaged: 2017-11-16 05:47:26
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 22,176
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/536156
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/toomuchplor/pseuds/toomuchplor
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Flattering though your opinion of me might be,” Eames said, at the time, “I don’t actually fancy twelve year old boys.”</p><p>“He’s seventeen,” Mal corrected him.</p><p>“Oh,” Eames said, and cut another look across the workshop.  “Seventeen?  Really?”</p><p>“Promise me,” Cobb repeated, more urgently.</p><p>“Yeah, of course,” Eames answered, still frowning over at Arthur, all elbows and floppy hair and — yes, there it was — interestingly mobile hips.  “No, I won’t lay a hand on his virgin —“</p>
            </blockquote>





	No Soul to Sell

**Author's Note:**

> Mpreg, underage, genderfuck (Arthur), surrealist dreamscapes, pregnancy kink, adoption, and childbirth descriptions. Originally posted as comment fic on [Bina's Inception Kink Fest 2.0](http://cherrybina.livejournal.com/239684.html), and finally posted here, edited, nearly a year later.

Forging is better learned by the young, like a second language or the ability to climb trees. Eames is only thinking of furthering Arthur’s education in dreamshare when he takes him under and shows him the basics. Eames is bettering the team, he’s diversifying their talent, he’s —

“I _am_ forging,” Arthur says very very tautly, his ears and then his neck going bright red with a blush only a seventeen-year-old could manage.

Eames opens his mouth, ready to contradict Arthur, to point to Arthur’s still-very-Arthurian reflection in the hinged three-way mirror, when Arthur squirms in his seat and Eames looks down into Arthur’s lap. It’s not that Eames has spent a lot of time looking at his teenage teammate’s groin — well, not _openly_ , not when Eames could _help_ it — but it wouldn’t even take a familiar eye to catch what Eames sees: a weird absence, the flies of Arthur’s trousers sitting oddly baggy across his hips and — 

“Well, that’s very interesting,” Eames says, “here I thought I’d seen all the bizarre rookie mis—” and Arthur squirms again, makes an unhappy embarrassed sound, and Eames doesn’t think about it, just leans over the back of Arthur’s chair and kisses his hot cheek, the side of his neck.

“I suck,” Arthur confesses with the awful shock of someone who’s realized for the first time in his life that he isn’t, in fact, perfect.

“It’s a start,” Eames says, pulse thudding guiltily in his throat, not because of the kisses but because — Arthur’s _letting_ him. Arthur’s — god help Eames — Arthur’s tilting his head to the side to make it _easier_ for Eames. “Can you — can you work your way up?” he asks, and palming Arthur’s narrow lovely chest isn’t crossing a line when Eames’ lips are already open against the lobe of Arthur’s ear. “Give me something to hold onto?”

Arthur’s eyes are fluttering closed. Eames can’t tell if it’s from humiliation, lust, or sheer concentration, but Arthur’s chest stays flat and male under Eames’ palm. Arthur huffs a frustrated sigh. “Apparently not,” he says. “God, I probably even have — I bet I’m doing it wrong all over.”

Eames should back up now, should go back to square one and ask Arthur to picture someone he knows very very clearly — _the line of the jaw, the set of shoulders, can you see it? can you?_ — but instead Eames lets his hand slip lower until one of his fingertips is resting on the button of Arthur’s trousers. “Do you want my expert opinion?” he asks. Whatever aspirations to a normal tone Eames might have harboured are gone now, his voice coming out shaky and broken and way past professional instruction.

Arthur’s eyes open and his reflected gaze locks with Eames’ in the mirror. His pupils are blown. “Yeah, okay,” he says, and there may not be a teenage boy cock under these trousers but there is definitely teenage boy horniness in Arthur’s lovely brown eyes. Eames half-laughs before reaching around with his other hand, unfastening Arthur’s button and lowering his zipper — far easier than it should be, disconcerting to see that flush and open wanting mouth and dark eyes, and yet encounter no obstacles here. Eames slips his hand into the open fly of Arthur’s trousers, encountering not the expected Y-fronts but soft taut cotton, a tiny satin bow. “Oh, well done,” Eames says, and means it. “Excellent detail. Lovely knickers.”

“They’re from this girl I,” Arthur says, and seems to give up the sentence as a bad job, breaking into a lovely shiver. “How do I know if I have the reactions right?” he asks. “How do I know if this is how a girl would”—

—“You don’t,” Eames answers, “but this is when you thank your lucky stars for the staggering diversity of human sexuality.” He’s amazed now, to hear his voice sounding almost normal, because Eames is tracking the soft narrow line of elastic over the place where Arthur’s thigh meets his hip, and Arthur is very warm and very realistic. “Are you wet?” Eames asks, and just like that his voice is wrecked again.

“Yeah, I,” Arthur says, and presses his thin but undeniably male shoulders back into Eames’ chest, lifts his hips a little and gives Eames better access. “Wetter than maybe I should be,” he says, “can you just —“

“Right,” says Eames nonsensically, “better make sure you’re not,” as though Arthur’s male frame, his adam’s apple, his dark faint stubble, his wide knuckled hands aren’t the point of concern, like the wetness of his forged pussy matters for the sake of realism, but Eames is pretty sure Arthur’s not really asking for Eames’ expert opinion anymore, he’s just asking for Eames’ fingers between his legs, and oh — oh, Eames can oblige. He strokes first over the fabric, which is slippery and damp and clinging to Arthur in a way that leaves no doubt that Arthur’s forgery is absolute if very localized. “Hmm,” Eames says, like he’s not pushing his erection into the plush back of Arthur’s chair, “I’d better,” and he pushes the crotch of Arthur’s knickers aside, slips his middle finger into the wet hot cleft.

Arthur grates out a disconcertingly low sound and pushes his hips into Eames’ touch. “Check inside,” he says, eyes closed, breath noisy. “Check inside, is it.”

Eames has to nudge Arthur’s thighs open with his free hand but after that it’s easy to slip his finger down a little and push into Arthur’s pussy. Arthur gasps and reaches up, clutches at the front of Eames’ shirt, mouth open, forehead suddenly glistening. If Eames gave the slightest shit about teaching Arthur anything right now, he might stop and let him know that he’s got it a little wrong, that Arthur _should_ have been turned on by the way Eames had rubbed his clit, that most girls didn’t — but Eames doesn’t care. If Arthur’s teenaged brain has him convinced that pussies like fingers inside them, Eames is perfectly fine with Arthur’s world view and he’s thrilled to provide the fingers in question. “Like this, until you come?” he asks.

“Yeah, okay,” Arthur agrees vaguely, riding Eames’ hand, blissfully unaware of how awkwardly Eames is twisted around the back of the chair to accommodate him. “How do I,” Arthur begins to ask, but the question unravels and he follows the dictates of his body instead, “oh fuck, fuck, your hand,” he mutters heavily, and again, Eames should probably tell Arthur that girls don’t usually squirt just from having one finger an inch inside, but Eames is too busy being pleased by the warm wet rush over his hand, a teenage boy coming in an anatomically impossible way. Arthur sags back against the chair, losing his grip on Eames’ shirt, and his expression goes dazed and vague.

“Right,” says Eames, abruptly coming to terms with what he’s just done, all the fucking lines he’s just, “right, well done for a first time out,” even though it’s not, it’s actually the worst Eames has ever seen from someone so young and intelligent, “let me just take my hand off your,” and Eames wriggles his wrist.

Arthur’s motion — his fingers clamping down over Eames’ wrist — is lightning fast, impressive for someone so outwardly post-orgasmic. “I might not know everything about girls,” he says, tilting his chin up to meet Eames’ eyes directly rather than via the mirror, “but I do know these things reset really fast.”

Eames’ feebly recovering higher functions plummet back into ignominy. “At least let me see you this time,” he says instead.

Arthur’s grin is sweet and dazzling and entirely unexpected coming from him, the boy with a thousand frowns and scowls. “Yeah, okay,” he says, and lets Eames go.

Eames dreams up a bed, a piece of chivalry that’s not only too little too late, but so wrong-headed given Arthur’s age and Eames’ position of authority over him that Eames can’t allow himself time to think about it. Instead he strips Arthur down, spreads his hairy lean boy-thighs open wide, and buries his face in Arthur’s neatly groomed and textbook-perfect pussy. Arthur might have the visuals right but his wiring is all wrong; Eames has never tongue-fucked a girl to orgasm so easily, and gotten so little reaction for that move where he sucks on the clit and flicks his tongue against it. The third time Arthur comes it’s around Eames’ fingers and with Eames licking the stretched wet skin around his knuckles while Arthur, improbably, slicks Eames’ hand yet again.

“Full marks for multiple orgasms,” says Eames, and lifts his head, looks up the naked boyish landscape of Arthur’s body to where Arthur is sweating and panting and looking very pleased with himself, “cheers.”

“What about you?” Arthur asks.

“Well, as I’ve still got a cock on I’d have to settle for,” Eames says, idly fingering Arthur, and pushing his neglected erection against the mattress, “but that’s neither here nor there, it’s about your education,” he finishes carefully.

“Eames,” Arthur says, grinning again, “can you stop pretending like you have morals now? You just went down on me for like half an hour.”

“Well,” Eames sputters, “because I”—

“Shut up and fuck me,” Arthur says, “we’re almost out of time on the clock so don’t be all precious about it, either.”

Eames shuts up, hastens onto his knees, and gets his trousers open, his cock out. He hesitates as he lines himself up. “Should I forge Robert Pattinson?” he asks. “Wait, are you one of those werewolf fans?”

“I’m Team Stop-Being-an-Asshole-and-Fuck-My-Pussy,” Arthur says, looping his leg over Eames’ hips in a very convincing way. “I’m not as innocent as you think.”

Eames is most of the way inside Arthur’s (tight, slippery, hot) pussy when Arthur comes up on his elbows and says, “Hang on, are you using protection?”

“Oh my lord,” Eames says, sweating and barely holding on to his sanity, “Arthur, this is why your forgery isn’t taking, your sense of internal logic is far too,” and he bottoms out, presses Arthur’s thighs open, “far too rigid, you really must have more imagination.”

“Yeah, I’m imagining you giving me dream STIs,” Arthur says, “god knows where you’ve been, Mal said something about catching you with a satyr down here or something,” but he’s laughing now, and lifting his hips joyously into Eames’ thrusts. “Hurry, we’ve got maybe a minute.”

Eames hurries; he’s only just finished coming when the dream goes hazy and Arthur snaps out of existence.

“How’d it go?” asks Cobb when Eames sits up in his folding chair, rubbing his eyes and sliding the needle out of his arm. Arthur is already halfway across the workshop, sitting down at his desk, cool and serious as ever, the front of his trousers comfortably bulgy again.

“He’s terrible,” Eames says unapologetically, and Arthur’s mouth turns up a little, showing that he’s eavesdropping. “Better used on point or as an architect, I think. You were right, Dom.”

Cobb accepts this readily enough, looping up the PASIV tubing, unaware that Eames just spectacularly broke the promise he’d made so faithfully to Cobb the day Mal had dragged lovely pretty underage Arthur through the door.

* * *

“Flattering though your opinion of me might be,” Eames said, at the time, “I don’t actually fancy twelve year old boys.”

“He’s seventeen,” Mal corrected him.

“Oh,” Eames said, and cut another look across the workshop. “Seventeen? Really?”

“Promise me,” Cobb repeated, more urgently.

“Yeah, of course,” Eames answered, still frowning over at Arthur, all elbows and floppy hair and — yes, there it was — interestingly mobile hips. “No, I won’t lay a hand on his virgin —“

* * *

Technically, of course, Eames hasn’t laid a hand on Arthur’s virgin anything; firstly, because it happened down in the dream, and secondly because Arthur’s since made it abundantly clear that he’s no virgin anyway.

“Christ, if this is what kids are like these days it’s little wonder that high school teachers are forever getting done for fiddling with you lot,” Eames says to Arthur, firmly removing his hand from Eames’ belt buckle. “Not here, I said. Not at work, not awake.”

Arthur sighs impatiently. “I’m not a kid,” he says.

“Wrong,” Eames answers.

“I’m not,” Arthur insists with a mutinous expression that is very much seventeen years old. “I’m not, and I’m not like other — I’m not some dumb teenager.”

“Wrong again,” says Eames. He rubs his temple, tiredly. “Look, I might be a right knob for having done what I did, but it doesn’t mean I’m about to do it again. So sod off, Lolita.”

“Fuck you,” Arthur says grouchily, and leaves the bathroom before Cobb can burst in on them.

* * *

Arthur is, of course, right. 

He’s not some kid, mutinous expressions aside; he’s not just some dumb teenager, for all his slight build and moodiness. Arthur might be only seventeen, but he is a prodigy; he’s logical to a fault, brilliant, quick-thinking, an incredibly fast study. Arthur is — yes — a failure at true forgery, but he’s a chameleon anyway, fading into the background where Eames’ strength is to be a shiny distraction on the job. Arthur melts into grey tailored suits and his new neat haircut and becomes ageless. Arthur’s already got a black belt in judo and it takes him all of three weeks to master handguns, another three for semi-automatics. Arthur’s aim is fast, deadly, exactly what you need where you need it, and it’s part of the weird world of dreamshare that you develop a marked preference for the teammate who gives you the bullet to kick you out of a tight spot. Arthur hits square in the forehead every time, or the heart, failing a clear shot. 

Dying doesn’t hurt when Arthur’s the one squeezing the trigger.

* * *

“Off, I don’t know, fuck, I just feel _off_ , okay?”

Eames raises his hands in surrender and tries not to smile. He’s worried, he really is – he’s seen Arthur bleeding out pints of blood from gut wounds and still not look this peaky – but Eames’ instinctive reaction to Arthur’s adorable rages will always and forever be amusement. “Forgive me for wanting a little speci”—Eames begins, and cuts himself off at the way Arthur’s face is going greenish white.

There’s only one way to react to that particular skin tone: Eames leaps back not a second too soon, Arthur bolting with a hand clapped over his mouth. A moment later Arthur’s bowed over the sink in the workspace kitchenette making godawful retching noises and looking thoroughly miserable.

“Is he hung over?” Mal asks in a stage whisper, arriving at this opportune moment.

“Who’d serve him, he looks like an escapee from a Justin Bieber video,” Eames asks, and catches Cobb shooting him a darkly suspicious look. “What’s that for? _I_ didn’t get him drunk!”

Cobb’s eyes narrow a bit more.

“He didn’t,” Arthur says, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand, shaky and pale. “Food poisoning. That fucking Thai place where we got takeaway for lunch yesterday, I bet.”

“Language,” says Cobb, frowning.

“That was the day before yesterday,” says Mal, frowning in a totally different way.

“Was it?” Arthur asks vaguely, rinsing the sink, already looking markedly better. “I’m okay, just — need some water, I’ll be fine.”

Eames jams his hands in his pockets and heads for his own workspace, leaving Cobb to fuss over Arthur and Mal to tell Cobb to stop being a mother hen. Things between Eames and Arthur have settled back into old habits, more or less — meaning Arthur’s given up trying to corner Eames in the loo and Eames has been vigilant about only staring at Arthur’s arse when Arthur is distracted. 

Arthur’s been perfectly behaved, actually, barring his guerrilla seduction attacks. It’s as though he’s trying to prove to Eames that he’s not a moony adolescent, that he can handle a casual workplace fuck and not let it affect the excellent standard of his work, not let it cause him to hesitate when he literally has to throw Eames under the bus on a test run gone wrong.

* * *

“Ow,” says Eames, coming to, breathless as though the massive tyre is still rolling over his middle.

Cobb blinks his eyes open and shakes his head at Eames. “Jesus, what a way to go,” he says, “why didn’t he just shoot you?”

They both look askance at Arthur, still under, probably calmly prowling the office tower they’d meant to work on, checking to see if his idea about Penrose steps in the fire escapes would pan out against Mal’s projections. Arthur, here and now, is slouched down in his chair, looking his age for once rather than five years older or younger. It takes a moment for Eames to piece together the difference between this Arthur and the one who’d just shoved him in front of a double decker bus. “The clever sod, he’s worked it out,” Eames says, impressed.

“Worked it out?” Cobb asks, busily leaning over Mal, checking her vitals and then Arthur’s.

Eames shakes his head, not bothering to explain. It’s tremendously subtle, and Cobb wouldn’t like that Eames even noticed, but in the dream, Arthur had forged a little more weight onto his frame, just enough to fill out his usual post-adolescent spareness, make him seem a few years ahead of himself. “Never mind,” Eames says, “I’m gasping, I’ll be back in a few,” and he gets up, patting for his packet of cigarettes, trying not to wince at the phantom ache of dream-fractured ribs.

* * *

The next day they trap a leading member of the London business community in his own mind and steal all his most valuable secrets; another day, another ten thousand dollars each.

* * *

“Who told you where I’m staying?” Eames asks, holding the spring-hinged door of his hotel room open just far enough to block the view into his suite. “Did Mal tell you?”

“This is a non-smoking room,” Arthur says, and plucks the half-smoked cigarette from Eames’ fingers, grimacing. “Do you know what this shit does to your body, chemically speaking?”

It’s more than a rhetorical question; if Eames admits any degree of ignorance, Arthur will tell him in excruciating detail exactly how Eames is destroying his internal organs with the demons nicotine and tar. Arthur’s eidetic memory is both comprehensive and indiscriminate. Eames has seen him devouring everything from books on microcircuitry analysis to wiki articles on bee husbandry to a terrifyingly pink tome belonging to Mal entitled _Your Fertile Womb_.

So there’s only one safe way to answer, really: sarcasm. “Ah, but it gets me so much trim, darling.”

“Gross, Eames,” says Arthur, and shoulders his way past and into the hotel room, stubbing the cigarette out in the ashtray on the coffee table. “So it’s nearly September,” he says, looking around the room, no doubt observing everything — the matchbook from the strip club, the three socks balled up on the couch, the glock in pieces for cleaning next to the TV. “I have school.”

“Sophomore year already?” Eames asks. “My, how grown up we’re getting.”

“You know I’m starting grad school,” Arthur says, dismissing Eames’ attempt at humour again. He looks over at Eames and subjects him to the same keen gaze as he studies Eames in his white cotton vest, suit pants, braces hanging down over his hips. The tattoos on Eames’ biceps and shoulders. “I thought I’d — say goodbye. I won’t be working any jobs with Mal and Dom until the spring, probably, and I have no idea when you’ll even be with them again.”

Eames looks Arthur over too, safe for once, away from Cobb’s squinting. Arthur’s changed back to his civilian clothes since the job — checkered shirt and a soft-looking navy hoodie, Levi’s and Converse and bulky over-ear headphones hugging his neck, his iPhone sticking out of his back pocket. He’s gorgeous; he’s also, very clearly, too young for Eames, who wears braces unironically and smokes because it was cool when he was Arthur’s age. 

“I can’t fuck you,” Eames tells him. “I really wish I could.”

“Barn door,” says Arthur. “Horse.”

“It’s different and you bloody well know it,” Eames says. “Look, Arthur, I don’t have a lot of guiding principles, but one of the few rules I cling to in the moral wasteland of my life is that I don’t fuck anyone who could, potentially, be a reincarnation of Kurt Cobain.”

Eames can almost see the click-click-link behind Arthur’s eyes as he mentally pulls up the date, probably filed under ‘Really Old Shit’. “That’s a fucking stupid rule,” Arthur says. “There’s not a single substantiated case of reincarnation being proven, even in India, and they have actual serious scientists doing the legwork on the”—

—“The rule stands,” Eames says, and adds, “I’m sorry, darling,” because he genuinely is.

Arthur puts his hands in the pockets of his hoodie, hunches his shoulders, losing about half a decade as his posture collapses inward. “You’re making a mistake,” he says in that too-deep voice of his, like his voice reflects the old soul Eames sees sometimes in his eyes.

“I know,” Eames says, “but I so rarely lose sleep over the people I _did_ fuck. It’s a charming novelty, at least.”

Arthur sighs and moves towards the door; where he should be a sulky teenage blur, he’s instead a heavy-hearted but grudgingly understanding young man. It’s doing Eames’ head in.

“All right,” Eames blurts out, “one more time. I must be off my nut even thinking it but”— he doesn’t get any further before Arthur’s on him, warm and soft in his cottony hoodie, elastic strong arms pulling Eames’ vest out of his trousers.

* * *

Fucking Arthur isn’t much different, topside; he’s wet, noisy, responsive, and his refractory period is devastatingly short, if not quite as brief as when Arthur was part female.

“Should I talk about how big you are?” Arthur asks, sometime between rounds one and two, stretching his arms over his head, smiling up at Eames. “I know a big part of the appeal is supposed to be about how you’re the first one who’s made me feel this way.”

“Am I?” Eames asks, pressing his thumb into the hollow under Arthur’s ankle bone.

Arthur considers this. “You’re the first one to do that thing with your fingers and your tongue at the same time.”

“How romantic,” Eames says, “I took your last remaining scrap of virginity.”

“Well, you’re definitely the oldest person I’ve fucked,” Arthur says, still thinking it through, and when Eames bites his toes in retaliation, Arthur’s dimples are devastating, make Eames’ head spin.

* * *

Eames generally spends the holidays on the French Riviera with his mum. Mind crime doesn’t have the same Christmas rush as the retail industry; in fact, the opposite is true. In the season of goodwill and peace on earth, even corporate masterminds seem to put away thoughts of forcibly ripping secrets from their fellow rich white middle-aged friends. The New Year brings new ambitions, though, which makes December a good time for gathering strength, for feasting on the spoils of the year past, for relaxation and general festivities and being one with the universe.

Eames’ mum, of course, makes this all but impossible.

“You know the gays are adopting, it’s simply everywhere,” she tells him, their first night.

“Have some more wine, Mummy,” Eames tells her.

“Of course I’d prefer if you found a woman,” she says, having some more wine, “but really, Frederick, I should be quite content with a son-in-law if you would only settle down.”

Eames all but dives for his phone when it rings, ignoring his mum’s muttered lecture on the terrible decline in manners among young people these days.

“Can you be in LA tomorrow?” Cobb asks.

“It’s important,” Mal says, on an extension.

“You know I have obligations,” Eames says, more for form’s sake than anything.

“It’s Arthur,” Cobb says.

“It’s very amusing,” Mal adds.

“I’ll get the next flight out,” Eames promises.

* * *

“We’re sorry to pull you away from your vacation,” Cobb says in the car on the way from LAX, “but this seems like it might be time-sensitive and we’re not making any headway, we need your expertise.” He shoots a quick glance over, breaking the intense gaze he’s been keeping fixed on the rainy freeway. “We’ll compensate you for your time, naturally,” he says, like Eames is a consultant in the real world of research instead of a dodgy drifter whose assumed forename changes biweekly.

“Naturally,” Eames parrots back in a stuffy voice, smirking. He’ll write up a ludicrous invoice, maybe, just for the pleasure of watching Cobb go all red in the face.

The truth is, Eames would have come anyway. He’d have come just for Mal, for the pleasure of spending Christmas drinking wine with the Cobbs and listening to them bicker about dinner preparations. Throwing Arthur into the mix — no doubt cut loose for the holidays from his graduate studies — makes the whole thing utterly irresistible. Eames is grinning helplessly with anticipation by the time Cobb opens the front door of the house, waves Eames in.

Arthur, however, seems less sanguine about their meeting. He’s sitting on the couch with his knees pulled up against his chest, slouchy and brooding and in need of a shave. He barely looks over at Eames; mostly, it’s the flicker of tension in his narrow jaw that tells Eames he’s been seen. Eames stares, caught out, at the heavy sweet bones of Arthur’s draped wrists, the narrow run of his forearms. He’d honestly hoped Arthur would fail to live up to his dreamy memories of their time spent together in the summer — but Arthur is even better than Eames let himself recall: he’s _real_.

“It’s so good of you to come,” says Mal, standing up from the couch beside Arthur, giving Arthur’s head a fond ruffle as she steps away. Her mouth is twitching with private humour; Eames can feel it against first his right cheek and then his left, kiss kiss. “It’s dreadful, or so I’m told.”

“Can we just”— Arthur breaks in, deep and resentful, still not looking over, “can we just fucking show him? Let’s not — just, come on.”

“Show me?” Eames says, but Cobb is already opening the PASIV case that’s lying on the coffee table, waving Eames to an armchair, mouth grim and impatient as Arthur’s. Mal is the only one who seems to find something funny about the situation, which is promising.

You lose time, going under, like coming off general anaesthetic — you wake in the dreamspace, sort of, only you have the sense you’ve been awake all along. It doesn’t help that they’re in the Cobbs’ living room still, again, different only from the real space in the details, the way things are a little too smooth, too orderly. Cobb’s sitting where Cobb was sitting, but Mal’s gone, left up in the waking world to monitor the three of them. Arthur’s still on the couch, still has his legs tucked up in front of him. 

Eames sighs, sipping the wine that Mal actually hadn’t got round to pouring, because this doesn’t quite seem the urgent case Cobb made out over the phone.

“You have to show him,” Cobb says to Arthur, and gestures towards Eames with the point of his chin.

Arthur scowls and unfolds his legs, stands up much more slowly than usual, and it still takes a minute for Eames to figure out what he’s meant to be showing Eames.

“You’ve dreamed yourself into the Freshman Fifteen?” Eames guesses.

Arthur rolls his eyes and tugs up the tails of his shirt, unbuckles his belt, turns sideways to Eames’ gaze. The thickening around his middle lacks the soft doughiness of a beer belly. It protrudes, rather, like an aberrant but sinuous continuation of Arthur’s otherwise taut and lean stomach. It looks like it would be almost hard to the touch. 

“You can see why we’re concerned,” Cobb says, propping his forearms on his knees, staring down at his clasped fingers. “He hasn’t been under since the summer, and he — he just showed up in the dream like this, and hasn’t been able to — to fix it.”

Eames blinks, squints, and blinks again. There isn’t much that makes Eames worry when he’s dreaming, but this has suddenly taken on the qualities of several of his worst nightmares. “Bloody fucking hell,” Eames breathes, frozen.

“And, well,” Cobb continues, as Arthur lets his shirt fall back into place, “Arthur here seems to think that this might be sort of a, uh, a side effect of your forgery lesson.” It’s clear from the blunt confusion in Cobb’s voice and the lack of audible rage that Cobb hasn’t put it together, not really. Eames himself is just barely beginning to put it together, and he’s not being helped much by Arthur’s ongoing refusal to look at him.

“Hang on,” says Eames, “just, I need,” and he pats down his suit jacket until he feels the new lump of a gun holster. “I need,” Eames says again, and pulls out the gun, cracks a bullet into Dom’s head before Dom has time to notice Eames isn’t actually looking for a fag.

“Jesus fucking christ, Eames,” Arthur says, eyes wide, looking back over his shoulder at Cobb’s corpse. “What the hell?”

“I didn’t really fancy having this chat with Cobb in the room,” Eames says, standing up, holstering his gun. “Come on, we’ve got maybe two minutes before he lurches back to life, give us another look.”

Arthur’s making eye contact now, at least, shocked into it by Eames’ burst of faux-violence. He only hesitates for a second before raising his shirt up again. “I’m showing more than I thought I would,” he says, “I’m only about 20 weeks, I guess. But then they say skinny — skinny people, they — it shows more.”

Eames splays his hand out and very gingerly presses it to the bulge just under Arthur’s navel.

“Don’t laugh,” Arthur says, strained.

Eames actually isn’t remotely tempted to laugh, for once. Arthur’s skin is warm, live, stretched thinly like the living head of a drum. “Does it kick?” he asks, because this is an oddity he’s never encountered in all his years forging.

Arthur nods, jerkily, like he’s still not certain Eames isn’t going to make fun of him. “It’s too soon for you to feel it,” he says, “but I can, sometimes.” He hesitates, flushes a little. “Now, actually.”

Eames pulls his hand back instinctively, disturbed on some deep level. “We have to put you right,” he says, “nothing to it.” He grabs Arthur by the narrow shoulders and turns him around to face the standing full-length mirror that wasn’t there a second ago. “Look at yourself,” he says.

Arthur doesn’t look at himself, fixing his gaze at Eames’ reflection over his shoulder instead. “You think I haven’t tried this?” he asks, long-suffering. “It — it doesn’t work.”

“Come on, now,” Eames says, hearing his own voice brusque and cool, “look. Try.”

Arthur looks at himself, frowns, tries. Nothing about him changes in the least, not the shadow of his faint beard, not the design on his t-shirt, and not the minutest decrease in the stubborn wrong lump disfiguring his otherwise picture-perfect Arthurian body.

“Like this,” Eames says, flickering into another skin, another, growing fat and thin, female and male, pale and dark, tall and short, like clicking through channels on the telly, his panic making him preternaturally skillful and quick. “Just,” Eames says, looking like Cobb, speaking with Mal’s voice, confused and worried, “just blink yourself into someone else.”

“If I couldn’t do it before,” Arthur says darkly, “why should I be any more successful now?”

“Necessity is the mother of”— Eames stops, regretting his choice of words. “Close your eyes. Be someone else, maybe.”

Arthur gamely closes his eyes. Nothing happens.

“He tried that already,” Cobb says, sitting up on the couch, wiping the circle of blood from his newly unblemished forehead. “We were kind of hoping you might have a better strategy than telling him to wish really hard.” He waves a hand at the pair of them. “Please tell me I’m right.”

Eames nods, agreeing without thinking, because he’ll make this right if it kills him, he’ll — “No, of course,” he says, “we’ll solve it.”

“Because we need Arthur for a sub-c militarization training session over spring break,” Cobb continues, “and I really doubt this corporate mogul is going to understand taking instruction from a teenage boy in his second trimester.”

“Third,” Arthur corrects almost absently. “By March it’ll be my third.”

Cobb frowns. “So you’re sure this is — it’s happening in real time, above?”

“Makes sense,” Arthur says, and cuts a short look in Eames’ direction. “The timing, I mean.”

“I still don’t know what,” Cobb says, aggrieved, and then the world flickers and Mal is sliding the needle from Eames’ arm, leaning over him sweet with perfume. Cobb is on the phone and Arthur (always the first to shake off the somnacin) has his head stuck in the fridge like the seventeen year old male he is, or possibly like the host of a twenty-week imaginary fetus.

“I wish I could see for myself,” Mal stage-whispers, wrapping the IV line, smiling at Eames. “How does he look, Dom won’t say.”

“Why can’t you see?” Eames asks, side-stepping the question, pulling a smile to match Mal’s, like he too is endlessly entertained by the mad situation.

“Dom is worried about what it might do,” Mal says, and in an unknowing echo of Arthur in the dream, she lifts the hem of her drapey blouse and reveals a swelling there a little less dramatic than Arthur’s own. “No dreaming for me. So you can see why it’s very important that we have Arthur back to his old self for this job in March.”

“No, of course,” Eames says, still smiling. “And cheers, you’ll be fantastic, much better than my mum. Some people simply shouldn’t be parents.” It just pops out, like that, and Eames can actually feel the blood draining from his face as he hears his own words.

But Mal’s turned away for the moment, thankfully, and misses his expression. Arthur wanders back over from the kitchen sipping at a massive glass of milk. He is slender again, himself entirely. To look at him, there’s nothing wrong.

“I don’t understand,” says Eames, rolling his cuff down, “you’re forging, down there. If you’re forging, why can’t you control it?” He sighs shortly. “I’ve seen beginners of all stripes in this line of work, but the issue is almost always a lack of consistency, of focus — I’ve never seen anyone suffer from being too convincing.”

Arthur shakes his head, shrugs his shoulders. “I haven’t been able to figure it out, either,” he admits, and he’s more obviously at ease now that Eames is actively trying to solve the problem rather than mock him. “It’s weird, it doesn’t feel like forging. It feels like — it’s exactly like, in a natural dream, how you can be utterly convinced that something’s real, and it takes you a few minutes after you wake up to realize something was strange.” He presses his lips together, visibly bracing himself. “In the dream,” he says, and meets Eames’ gaze, “I’m pregnant. That’s — that’s all there is to it.”

“Not just in the dream,” Mal says. “Look at you, you hate drinking milk.”

Arthur looks down at the glass in his hand as though surprised to see it. “I do,” he agrees, startled. “What”—

“Because it’s what you’re supposed to do,” Mal says, “you’re supposed to eat well and drink lots of milk and avoid — when’s the last time you had coffee? I can’t remember Dom shouting at you for stunting your growth since you’ve been back.”

Arthur shakes his head. “Gave it up,” he says.

“When?” Mal persists. Dom has ended his phone call and is taking an interest in the discussion now, too.

“The fall, I guess,” Arthur says confusedly. “I don’t know.”

“You’re a graduate student who doesn’t drink coffee?” Eames asks, narrowing his gaze.

“I — I hadn’t thought,” Arthur says. “My stomach was acting up. I thought the coffee was to blame.”

“Sick in the mornings, mostly?” Mal persists.

Arthur’s ears flash red. “That’s ridiculous, I’m not _capable_ of pregnancy, I’m a male, for christ’s sake.”

“Your body isn’t capable,” Mal agrees cagily, and Eames picks up her train of thought now.

“Your brain is pregnant,” he says, stunned. “Arthur, you’re not just dreaming it. You believe it, on some level.”

“No, I don’t,” Arthur says, very quickly.

“Right,” Eames says, and pulls out his packet of cigarettes from inside his jacket (noticing Cobb’s flinch, but not bothering to grin at it). He taps out a cigarette and puts it between his lips, digging his lighter from his pocket and flicking the top.

“Don’t,” Arthur says, strangled-sounding.

“Why not?” Eames asks around the tip of the cigarette, frozen, raising an eyebrow.

“Because — Mal,” Arthur says. “You can’t smoke in front of her.”

“Oh, I don’t mind,” Mal says breezily. “Go ahead, Eames.” Dom looks like he wants to object but he doesn’t, thankfully.

Eames flicks the lighter and holds it to the end of the cigarette, inhaling to help the flame catch.

“Oh, for,” Arthur blurts, and steps in, pushes Eames’ hand away, grabs the cigarette from his lips. “Don’t,” he says, almost frantic.

“Fancy a nip?” Eames asks, going for the other inside pocket of his jacket, the one with the little pewter flask.

Arthur grates out an exasperated sound. “No, of course not,” he says. “I’m underage.”

“Right,” says Eames, who has slipped Arthur scotch and wine more times than he can count, away from Dom’s watchful eye. “That’s the reason, then?”

“That’s,” Arthur agrees, swallowing, “that’s — it’s really bad for the baby, okay?” He looks shocked as soon as he says it.

“What the bloody hell is going on in your head?” Eames asks wonderingly, almost as stunned as Arthur looks.

“It’s not possible,” Cobb chimes in, thinking aloud, shaking his head. “No, Miles said it couldn’t be done.”

“Well, it has been done, so there’s my father proved wrong again,” Mal answers, picking up Cobb’s line of thinking like it’s an old argument between them. “Obviously it’s been done, somehow. Arthur’s proof.”

“You can always trace an idea back to its source,” Cobb returns, “no, it’s — it’s impossible.”

“Wait,” says Arthur, apparently catching on, “are you talking about — no, Mal, Dom’s right. It can’t be done. Miles’ theoretical modelling shows that even two levels down, the subconscious mind will”—

—“Are you talking about inception?” Eames butts in helplessly. “Are you saying Arthur’s been incepted with the idea that he’s pregnant?”

“Of course not,” Arthur and Dom snap, irritably, at the same time Mal shouts, “Yes!” They all exchange glares while Eames blinks at them, and then Mal picks up the thread. “He can’t forge his way out because he’s not forging to begin with,” she says urgently. “The idea is planted. Arthur’s mind is convinced.”

“Well, now it’s not,” Arthur says, sounding uncharacteristically childish. “If I’ve been incepted, assuming that’s even possible, being made aware of the fact has got to undo the plant!” He looks between Mal and Cobb. “Right?”

Cobb shakes his head slowly, regretfully. “If that’s what — if that could be what happened, we don’t think it would be that simple. Ideas are resilient, they grow and spread like a cancer.”

“It’s a mad idea,” Eames insists. “You may as well have convinced him he has a tail, or that he’ll act like a dinosaur when someone rings a bell.”

“It’s not post-hypnotic suggestion, it’s entirely different,” Mal says to Eames, dismissively. “You’ve said it yourself often enough, Arthur’s got an exceptionally rigid mind, and we’ve always hypothesized that more logical brains would be more susceptible to inception — minds like Arthur’s are unused to discarding thoughts, they work them over and over on a subconscious level.”

“What we need to figure out,” Cobb says, “is who would have a stake in disabling a member of our team. Who are our enemies? It’s got to be a top extractor, working an inception like this. Arthur, when did you start getting sick again? We need to work out approximately when they might have pulled the job, it’ll help us narrow down the list of suspects.”

The fact that Mal joins in the ensuing uncomfortable silence tells Eames that she’s figured it out, too.

“What,” says Cobb, dividing a look among them, baffled. “What — did something happen? What happened? Did you know about this?”

The silence stretches on for a minute while Eames contemplates his chances of making a clean getaway if he breaks for the door now. Arthur’s the one who speaks, finally. “Assuming Mal is right,” he says, and clears his throat, “I mean, if she’s right, then — it was an inside job.”

It’s such an unfortunate choice of words that Eames laughs involuntarily and gets a deathly glare from Arthur in return. “Sorry,” he says, and arranges his face into a worried frown. “It’s just”—

—“You’re the first person to pull off inception,” Mal says, to Eames, not bothering to mask her own delight, “and you did it with your _penis_!”

* * *

There follows a lot of shouting, with Cobb tossing around phrases like ‘sick motherfucker’ and ‘you _promised_ ’ and ‘god, don’t tell me the details!’. Arthur doesn’t bother defending Eames, which is probably payback for Eames’ earlier laughter, and Eames gives up defending himself fairly early on as well, feeling that he’s a lost cause. Mal wanders off and makes a pot of herbal prenatal tea and pours a cup for Arthur, who drinks it sullenly but without objection.

“When are you due, anyway?” Mal asks during a lull when Cobb seems to have run out of words to express his outrage.

“Middle of May, I guess,” Arthur says, and scrapes a palm over his face. “God, the middle of marking undergraduate papers. What terrible timing.”

“You’re about a month ahead of me, then,” Mal says conversationally. Mal has always had a disturbingly easy time accepting completely mad things, thinks Eames.

Arthur sighs in response. “What do you think labour will look like?” he asks of no one in particular.

“Well, of course we’re not letting it get that far,” Cobb says in a very gruff paternal voice. “We’re taking care of this here and now.”

Arthur looks up from where he’s been brooding into the steaming surface of his tea. “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”

“You’re seventeen years old!” Dom says. “You’re not becoming a teen mom!”

“Of course I’m not!” Arthur exclaims. “Dom, it’s a _dream_.”

“So we’ll dream up a clinic!” Dom shouts back. “We’ll dream up a nice doctor.”

Mal’s face, which has been calm and resigned during all Dom’s yelling, suddenly goes dark. “This isn’t your decision to make,” she says, appalled.

“We need him for the job in March!” Dom says, matching her tone. “Mal, this is crazy, we can’t let this continue.”

“This,” Mal repeats, very very slowly, “is not your decision to make.”

Arthur looks bewildered, and he meets Eames’ eyes as if seeking some support, but Eames is busy realizing that mad or not, impossible or not, Mal is absolutely right on this one point, and Eames is abruptly glad he didn’t voice his secret approval of Dom’s line of thinking. “I need some air,” Arthur says suddenly, and sets the tea down, stands up, heads for the door into the backyard.

Eames doesn’t want to follow him, but it’s clear that Mal and Cobb are about to have a Serious Marital Discussion, and he’s better off in Arthur’s company than theirs at the moment.

“I’m sorry,” Eames says, coming up beside Arthur on the deck outside. “For what it’s worth. I know it’s not much.”

“How could you know,” Arthur says flatly, tiredly. “You said, imagine everything in detail, but I bet you didn’t count on the level of detail my brain would provide.”

“Really not,” Eames says wryly. “Still, I shouldn’t’ve — well. What’s done is done, I suppose.”

Arthur shifts his balance and his forearm brushes Eames’ sleeve. “I miss coffee,” he says. “I didn’t realize it until now.”

“Well,” says Eames, “you could have it again if you wanted. Now you know why you’ve been avoiding it?”

Arthur considers this and then shakes his head. “I — I don’t think I could. Dom’s right, I can feel it, it’s this thing that’s always at the back of my mind, somehow. I can’t drink coffee because —“ and he flattens a hand over his utterly unpregnant middle. “I can’t. Even getting myself to hook up to the PASIV has been — I didn’t know why it was so hard to do.”

“Bugger,” says Eames sympathetically, and then reaches a tentative hand up to pat Arthur’s narrow shoulder.

Arthur shrugs off his touch and throws him an amused look. “You don’t have to do that,” he says. “I’m okay. I’m still me, you know.”

“Maybe I’m the one wanting a little comfort,” Eames says, put out.

“Right,” says Arthur, “if Dom catches us comforting each other he might actually have a stroke.”

They snicker over this for a second, quiet and guilty under the distant shouting from the house. Eames brushes his sleeve against Arthur’s arm again, furtively, and Arthur shifts into the touch without seeming to notice.

“It really is shitty timing,” Arthur says, “all my papers are due at the same time as me.”

“So you’re not,” Eames angles uncomfortably, “not, then?”

Arthur shakes his head, certain and calm. “I couldn’t,” he says, simply.

“Pity you can’t at least shift the dates around,” Eames says, “Mal and Dom could use you in March, it sounds like. Those militarizations go much faster with two trainers, Dom will be under for weeks in the dreamspace, alone with the subject.”

They get the idea at the same moment, turning to look at each other, startled and grinning.

* * *

“Two levels down,” Arthur says, “we can get through four and a half months in a matter of hours up here.”

“We could do it tomorrow,” Eames joins in quickly. “By Christmas Arthur could be — it would be done.”

“I just need to take a look over some adoption proceedings,” Arthur says, “so I can sign something that will convince my brain that — that it’s taken care of, I guess.” They’re almost tripping over each other’s sentences, so eager are they to explain their plan.

“He’s already read all your pregnancy books,” Eames says, “and we can dream up an obstetric surgeon for a C-section.”

“Right,” Cobb says, matching their urgency, “Mal, you can stay up here and monitor our vitals. Eames, you can wait on the first level and take point. I’ll go down one more with Arthur.”

“Oh, I don’t bloody think so,” Eames scoffs, annoyed. “I’ll be the one on the second level, you can sit around the first level for a week, thanks.”

“It’ll be unstable,” Cobb objects, “two levels down, he’s going to need someone with better architectural skills constructing the dreamspace. You know your dreams aren’t very solid.”

“Which is why you should be on the first level,” Eames says, “making a firm ceiling for the next dream down. If I’m up top the second level is going to be wobbling around like mad.”

Cobb shakes his head. “This is a bad idea, we don’t even know what’s going to happen with Arthur on the first level if his pregnancy is progressing on the second. I should be down there with him.”

“What does Arthur want?” Mal interjects sensibly.

Arthur looks between them, clearly struggling with the choice. “I want Eames,” he says at last, avoiding Cobb’s gaze.

“We could bring in a third party,” Cobb suggests, sighing. “Do you think Nash would—“

—“No,” Arthur objects, flushing. “The fewer people know about this, the better.” 

Cobb makes an unhappy sound and glares at Eames, then at Arthur. “He’s still seventeen,” he says. “Eames.”

“You honestly think I haven’t learned my lesson from this?” Eames shoots back irritably. “Hands off the jailbait, message fucking well received, right?”

“Besides,” Arthur chimes in, “it’s not like Eames is really going to be tempted, is it? I look like a weird freak of nature down there.”

Eames opens his mouth to let Arthur know that, actually, he’s not as put off as he might have thought, but sees Cobb’s beetled brows and thinks better of it. He gives a simple nod instead, trying to seem like he’s in earnest wholesome agreement with Arthur.

“Right,” says Cobb, grudgingly, “Eames, you and I should go under and I’ll teach you the layout of this house anyway, give you someplace to spend a few months.”

“About that,” Eames says, “I’ve been wondering if we ought not to avoid using familiar places. Seems like we need to give Arthur’s mind as clear a division as possible between dreaming and reality. Muddling up the real world with the dream might have made the inception easier in the first place.”

Cobb frowns and then goes pale. “Did you — in our _bed_?”

Arthur clears his throat and mutters something about being hungry, and Eames suddenly feels the need to make a call to his mum, let her know he’s arrived safe in the States.

* * *

The next morning they leave Mal sitting on the couch, curled up with a bowl of popcorn and a book that Arthur’s long since devoured, and then they leave Cobb looking much less relaxed sitting in an anonymous hotel room on the seventeenth floor, and at last Eames is standing at the window looking out at the back garden Cobb had helped him design. They’re in England, sort of, and Arthur’s just coming back into the sitting room presumably having made his own inspection of the house while Eames was still transitioning down to this level.

“To your tastes?” Eames checks.

“There aren’t enough books,” Arthur says, “and what the hell is this, anyway?” He holds out a copy of the first Harry Potter book, which starts off with a likely-sounding chapter title and devolves quickly into run-on sentences that read like a badly-remembered summary of the plot. _Something about a snake, or maybe that’s actually the next one_ , it says.

“Erm, I skim a lot,” Eames says. “Sorry.”

“Are they all like this?” Arthur asks, horrified.

“Well, you can probably dream up something a little more concrete,” Eames offers. He’s trying not to stare at Arthur’s middle, but it’s disconcerting, the way it’s sticking out a little.

“But the only things I can dream up are things I’ve read before,” Arthur points out grumpily. “This sucks.”

“Perils of being my mark, darling,” Eames says, not without sympathy. “I do better with visuals,” and he waves a hand at the Degas on the wall, the iridescent lithographs under glass, the tiny paper sculpture on the mantle.

Arthur casts a bored eye over all of it. “I’m hungry,” he says, folding his arms over his chest.

“I’m good with flavours too,” Eames offers brightly. “What do you fancy?”

He expects Arthur to be polite, to insist on having whatever Eames feels like making, but instead Arthur frowns, thinking, and says, “Waffles. With strawberries. And bacon. Oh, and eggs. No, hashbrowns. Actually”—

—“I’ll just do a bit of everything,” Eames says, grinning, and waves Arthur over to the cozy kitchen area, starts pulling down plates and covers to go over them. “Sit, darling.”

Arthur’s still looking around with an evaluative air. “This isn’t bad,” he says, “Cobb makes it sound like your dreams are like being in a Dali painting.”

“Well, there may be giraffes out in the garden sometimes,” Eames tells him cheerfully. He slaps a cover over a larger plate and lifts it up again, revealing a steaming stack of fresh waffles. “Go on, help yourself,” he says.

Arthur stares. “How did you,” he says. “I thought you were going to cook?”

“You seemed hungry,” Eames says, worried he’s done the wrong thing. “I thought you wouldn’t like to wait.”

“You can just —“ Arthur says, blinking, “I didn’t know you could do that.”

“Of course you can,” Eames says, huffing out a disbelieving laugh. “Christ, what has Cobb been doing with you down in here? This is basic stuff.”

“Architecture,” Arthur says, “paradoxical structures, mazes, collapsible spaces. Firearms training.” He licks his lips, troubled. “Sometimes…we play chess.”

“You made the right choice, going with me,” Eames assures Arthur, smirking now. “Tuck in, I’ll whip up some — strawberries, you said?”

Soon enough the small kitchen island is laden with plates of food and Arthur is ecstatically trying a bit of everything. Eames eats a little more slowly, not driven by the same hunger as Arthur, and he’s still clearing up the last of his bacon when he looks up to see Arthur settling a cover over a plate with a look of deep concentration, lifting it up and finding it still bare save for a few waffle crumbs. “Didn’t work,” Arthur says sadly.

“What is it you wanted?” Eames checks, reaching across to take the cover.

“No, that’s not,” Arthur says distractedly, “I just wanted to try it.”

“Well, you have to have a specific,” Eames begins to explain, but Arthur’s shaking his head, flushing a little with frustration and embarrassment.

“I was thinking of a boiled egg,” he says. “A six-minute egg.”

Eames slaps the cover down, lifts it up to reveal a white egg in the middle of the pristine plate. “Help yourself.”

Arthur picks up the egg, turns it in his hand. “It’s still warm,” he says, amazed. “How do you”—

“Think of an egg,” Eames says, unable to make it simpler for Arthur. “Just — think of an egg!”

Arthur lets the egg sit in the hollow of his hand and gazes at it, his expression unreadable. “I did the best in the class at this,” he says. “You know, that science project where you drop an egg off the roof of the school? Mine didn’t break.”

“Did you boil it first?” Eames asks. “Cheater.”

“No,” Arthur says, not bothering to smile. “It’s all about the padding, and then the air resistance. Surface area.”

“Mine broke,” Eames says, “but then I was actually just throwing it off the roof for fun.” He pauses. “I was aiming for the headmaster.”

“Did get him?” Arthur asks, dimpling.

“Of course I did,” Eames says, offended. “It was a very good school, we had courses in marksmanship.”

“They do a thing, in high schools at home,” Arthur says, like they’re really in England and not sleeping in the Cobbs’ living room in L.A., “where you get an egg and you’re supposed to treat it like a baby. It teaches responsibility and the consequences of unprotected sex.” He tosses the egg lightly and it falls back into his palm with a soft thwack. “I was excused from that unit, being only nine years old at the time.”

“Mistake, obviously,” Eames says. “Here you are, up the spout. You should sue for damages.”

Arthur laughs lightly and tosses the egg again. “I did a two hundred page report on human reproduction instead,” he says. “It had seven appendices. I got 173 percent.” He rolls the egg between his palms now, pressing until Eames hears the faint crackle of shell. “So long, Eggbert,” Arthur says, and starts peeling.

* * *

Eames has spent long stretches of time in dreams before, but never without a purpose beyond simply passing the time. He and Dom made the house small, the space outside fading into vague shapes like the background of a painting, mostly to keep everything as stable as possible. There are projections passing outside on the street, but no one ever ventures near the house, which they take as a sign that Arthur’s mind is content with Eames’ dreamspace.

But ‘content,’ Eames reflects, may be the wrong word. Arthur is bored out of his mind, but still firmly trapped inside Eames’. He can dream up books (and Eames still hasn’t figured out why those and not eggs) but they’re all books he’s read before; Arthur reads them resentfully, quickly, with the air of someone being forced to repeat a task that’s far beneath their skill level. Eating provides some distraction, particularly when Eames is able to conjure a dish Arthur has never tried, and cooking is yet more successful in keeping Arthur occupied, the busy and strictly needless work of dicing a tomato, stirring a sauce, peeling potatoes, icing cookies. Eames has never before been so grateful for his gourmand streak, because Arthur’s appetite is terrifying and endless as his usual appetite for books. They can’t work out whether it’s because he went under before breakfast, up in the waking world, or if it’s a side effect of his progressing pregnancy.

Progressing apace, actually; while the days drag by, Arthur seems to be getting bigger by the minute. They’ve been under for scarcely a week before Arthur’s midriff bulk passes out of the realm of possibly-just-plump and into definitely-pregnant-strange-as-it-seems. If Arthur’s bothered by it, he doesn’t show any signs in Eames’ presence. He moves as easily and swiftly as ever, if a little less gracefully, and by some silent accord neither of them mentions Arthur’s expanding middle. They certainly don’t use the B-word, haven’t once in all this time.

It’s not the only taboo between them, though, and it’s not even the most jarring one. Eames learns this the first night when they’re watching Eames’ version of _Teen Wolf_ judder by on the telly, the plot barely hanging together and the movie having rather more nude communal shower scenes than Eames thinks he remembers from the original movie. He chances a look over at Arthur, who’s given up complaining and is apparently resigned to suffering through Eames’ already patchy memory filtered through his yet more abysmal attention span. His expression is sober and his shoulders are soft, relaxed, gentle. Eames reaches over helplessly, thinking that he’s not really breaking the letter of Cobb’s law because what’s a little snuggling between birth parents?

“What are you doing?” Arthur asks, abruptly tense under Eames’ touch.

“I’m gathering you in and wrapping my arms round you and making you feel warm and safe in my strong manly embrace,” Eames says, surprised by Arthur’s reaction.

“Yeah, I wish you wouldn’t,” Arthur says coolly, pulling away.

“Oh,” says Eames. “Right.”

No touching, of course.

* * *

They have separate bedrooms, obviously, as Cobb had overseen the whole design. Every morning Eames opens his wardrobe and wears whatever is hanging on the rail: three piece suit, or yoga pants, or jeans and a t-shirt, or something not unlike a leisure suit. Arthur wears the same four or five things, does laundry when he runs out, but he doesn’t bother asking Eames how to dream up different clothes. Probably he’s glad for the chore of laundry, something mundane to keep him busy — first the loading of the washer and then the pegging out of the wet clothes in their postage stamp sized back garden, Arthur’s checked shirts and khaki trousers flapping in the sunshine.

“Have you got a cock on, by the way?” Eames asks over dinner (Thai beef curry with coconut rice, melon sherbet for dessert) one night, about two weeks in.

Arthur coughs into his napkin for a minute or so before he recovers enough to answer. “What kind of a fucking question,” he begins grouchily, but Eames interrupts.

“It’s hard to tell, none of your trousers fit properly anymore.”

Arthur’s anger loses a little of its edge and he arches an eyebrow. “You’re looking at my crotch?”

Eames grins in answer.

Arthur flushes, but the curl at one corner of his mouth suggests he’s less annoyed and more pleased. “Yes,” he says, “yes, okay? I have — all the usual equipment.”

“That’s fascinating, really,” Eames says, frowning, trying to picture it.

“Yeah, it’s something else,” Arthur says with a lot less wonder in his voice. “Didn’t you say something about sherbet?”

Eames has learned by now not to keep a hungry Arthur waiting, so he rises hastily and goes to the ice cream maker, scoops out the dessert, brings the bowl back and sets it in front of Arthur. The impulse to kiss Arthur’s temple is overwhelming for a moment, so Eames takes a hasty step back; he doesn’t want to encounter another rebuff. There are still four months left and it will be hard enough to manage getting on without provoking Arthur knowingly.

* * *

“We need a project,” Eames says the next day, and hands Arthur the sketchbook he’d dreamed up for him. It’s leather-bound, weighty and satisfying, with heavy watercolour paper pages interleaved with fine tissue. From Arthur’s continued dismissal of the art all over the house, Eames has gathered that Arthur’s not a fan of paintings and sculpture and photography, but Eames has also noticed that Arthur has a serious weakness for things that are both functional and lovely: clothing, furniture, even office supplies. His preference for moleskines, Eames thinks, has more to do with this predilection than any attempt at youthful hipsterism on Arthur’s part.

Eames watches carefully as Arthur opens the sketchbook, pages through it with a frown. He slows down as he goes, starts stroking the grain of the paper as if he doesn’t even notice he’s doing it. “What’s this for?” Arthur asks. “What am I, keeping a feelings journal or something?”

“If you want,” Eames allows, smirking, “but I rather thought I could teach you the basics of forgery.” He sees Arthur about to object, so Eames hastens on. “Art forgery,” he says, “not dream forgery. Have you got any knack for drawing?”

It’s a bit of a surprise when Arthur doesn’t immediately shake his head. Instead he lifts one shoulder. “I can draw from a photograph,” he says. “I’m good at copying what’s in front of me.”

“That’s,” Eames says, and clears his throat, “that’s an excellent starting point.” He sits down beside Arthur and opens the pencil case he’s brought along, selects a soft leaded pencil and a rounded worn gum eraser. “Here, start with a still life. Anything in the room.”

Arthur takes the pencil and eraser, frowns around the room, and then looks at Eames. “What’s the point of improving my drawing skills down here?” he asks. “It’s muscle memory, at least in part. Nothing’s going to transfer to the waking world.”

“The point is that we have a fucking age to get through,” Eames says, as sweetly as possible, “and if I have to watch you reread _What to Expect When You’ve Been Incepted_ one more time I’m going to burn that bloody book.”

Arthur snorts, nods, and puts the pencil to paper.

It turns out that Arthur is, actually, reasonably talented with drawing, and he improves with a rapidity that speaks more about his keen mind than his native talent; once he understands a technique of perspective or composition, he can (in the dream, anyway) instantly translate it to the page. In this way he progresses rapidly from still life to landscape to portrait, and then to copying the sketches of the masters that Eames conjures for him. They move on to pastels, and then to watercolours, and to oil paints.

“Is this safe for me to use?” Arthur says, frowning down at the crumpled aluminum pigment tube Eames handed him.

Eames takes it back, turns it over, and scrapes at an errant dried paint glob with his thumbnail, revealing a finely printed line of text that reads _Non-Toxic. Safe for use by pregnant men in the dreamscape._

“Very funny,” says Arthur, but he takes it back, pops the tube’s lid, and squeezes a glob onto the clean new palette Eames gave him.

It’s nice work, teaching Arthur, which shouldn’t be surprising as Arthur is the consummate pupil: quick to understand, quicker yet to extrapolate the next logical step, and surprisingly patient with Eames’ explanations, trusting that Eames has the greater knowledge in this area at least. It occupies their days for two weeks, three, and Arthur starts turning out convincing forgeries, spending hours dabbing at his canvas and frowning at Eames’ dreamed-up originals.

“What are you doing, anyway?” Arthur asks, looking over at Eames, the first words he’s spoken in hours.

Eames looks at his easel and over at Arthur. “Painting you.”

“Don’t paint me like this,” Arthur says, dismayed, looking down at his paint-spattered dress shirt, untucked and draping loosely over his belly. “Eames.”

Eames clucks his tongue, amused. “But you’re such a lovely subject.”

Arthur sighs and puts his brush down, walks over to stand behind Eames and see for himself. “Why am I blue?” he asks. “What’s that orangey thing?” He looks at Eames. “You’re terrible at this.”

“It’s called abstract portraiture, darling,” Eames tells him. “It’s — it’s not about copying what I see.”

Arthur looks at the painting and then down at himself, a faint line appearing between his brows. Clever as Arthur is, calm and mature as he’s being about this whole mad situation, it’s easy to forget how young he is, but Eames sees it now, clear as anything: Arthur can’t read the emotion Eames is painting, because it’s nothing he’s ever felt, this mixture of tenderness and protectiveness and lust and admiration. “I want to learn this,” he says, probably unaware of his hand smoothing over his belly, stroking away some internal turmoil. “Can you teach this?”

Eames bites down on the impulse to say _no, it’s nothing I can teach_. “Does he — I mean, is it kicking?”

Arthur looks down at his fingers. “Yeah, when I stand still for a long time he — it — apparently it’s because they’re lulled by movement. It’s the same when I’m trying to sleep at night.”

“Hmm,” says Eames, because this is the first he’s heard of Arthur having trouble getting to sleep; usually it’s _goodnight_ at ten-thirty sharp and then Arthur disappears into his bedroom until morning.

“I’m starving,” Arthur says, back at his own easel now.

“Let me just tidy up,” Eames says, “I’ll nip into the kitchen and”—

“No,” says Arthur, “I’ll grab something, it’s okay. You — keep doing that.”

Eames stares after Arthur’s retreating form, which looks the same as ever from the back, barring the shapelessness of his clothes. Huge as Arthur’s getting, it doesn’t seem to have affected his gait or his energy. Eames looks back at his easel, the mostly-blue canvas, the sinuous lines of Arthur’s form and the live amber thread that represents the thought gone viral inside him. Eames doesn’t consciously decide to keep painting, only realizes he’s fallen back into his work when Arthur comes back into the room munching on an apple, hovering at Eames’ side again.

“I know it’s not flattering,” Eames says, taking Arthur’s scrutiny for disapproval. Arthur has — or had, before all of this — an impressively wide streak of vanity.

“I look so far away,” Arthur says instead, and his voice is wistful blue.

* * *

Eames wakes to some slight noise from within the house, but instead of dropping off again as usual, he gets up and pads down the corridor towards the faint light coming from the living room. Arthur is sitting on the couch cross-legged with his sketchbook in his lap, dragging the pencil over the page in long sure strokes, frowning and bleary-eyed.

“Such diligence,” Eames says quietly, smiling, but his expression isn’t matched by Arthur’s when Arthur lifts his face to see Eames. Arthur, rather, looks grouchy and frustrated and displeased with Eames’ presence. “The kicking keeping you awake again?” Eames asks, a little more tentatively.

“No, I just,” Arthur says, and sticks the pencil behind his ear, rips out the page he’d been drawing on. “I suck.”

This is surprising, not least because it’s days since Arthur expressed any doubts at all over his ability to sketch. He has a half dozen notebooks full of almost photographic studies of everything in the house. Eames comes close enough to pick up the crumpled paper Arthur’s rejected, smooths it out, sees his own face there. It’s an excellent likeness; Eames, on paper, is smirking just a little. “My mouth isn’t exactly like that,” Eames allows, searching for any other flaws.

“Yes, it is,” Arthur returns grumpily. “It’s exactly like that. Everything I draw is exactly how I see it.” He pulls the pencil out from behind his ear and flings it across the room, follows it up with the sketchbook. “It’s ridiculous.”

“Darling,” says Eames, and makes to lay his hand on Arthur’s shoulder, but of course Arthur shrugs it off angrily and wrenches out of reach.

“Will you just — fuck off?” Arthur demands, voice abruptly wrecked with anger and frustration and the threat of tears. “Just — would you — leave me the fuck alone, for a fucking minute?”

It’s not fair — Eames leaves Arthur alone constantly, is killingly careful about it, only offering his presence when Arthur asks for it — but it’s also not the point. The point is that Arthur is rubbing the heel of his hand into his eye, hunching his shoulders miserably, breathing short desperate breaths; the point is that he’s obviously reached the end of some shortening rope and Eames hadn’t even known Arthur was clinging to any kind of rope at all. “Darling,” Eames says again, helplessly, stricken, regretting the word as soon as he’s said it because he’s sure it’s not the right thing to say.

Sure enough, Arthur breaks, he cracks open, and suddenly he’s on his feet and shoving Eames by the shoulders, angry and stronger than he looks, making small rageful noises and advancing on Eames like he means to hurt him badly. Eames gets his hands up instinctively, tries to catch Arthur’s hands, to trap him, but it’s a hard go because Arthur is angry like a spitting cat and Eames is too startled by it for any kind of proper reaction. 

“Hey,” Eames says, turning away from Arthur’s fist as it descends onto his shoulder, “hey, enough.” For lack of a better strategy, Eames opens his arms wide now, offering no resistance. Instead of backing down or taking advantage of Eames’ lack of defenses, Arthur does neither; he just drops his hands to his sides and collapses forward onto Eames, shaking and gasping for air.

Eames has his arms around Arthur before he can even process the thought, and Arthur presses his face into Eames’ neck and utters noises that are halfway between sobs and growls. Eames has never been good with other people’s emotions unless he’s manipulating them to his own ends, so he’s surprised when he hears himself shushing Arthur softly, surprised to feel his fingers carding soothingly through Arthur’s hair, his body shifting to accommodate Arthur’s curves.

“‘M sorry,” Arthur says, some minutes later, pulling back, sniffing. “Shit, I — I thought I had all of this under control.”

Eames huffs a disbelieving laugh, even though he’d thought Arthur did too. “It’s okay to be a little out of control,” he tells Arthur. “If ever there was a situation that merited a lack of control, this is it, I’d think.”

Arthur smiles, wobbly and weak. “You seem so calm all the time.”

“Well,” Eames says, “I’m not, first off. And secondly, I’m not the one with,” and he slides his palm from Arthur’s waist over to his stomach, the warm taut bulk of it. “You can’t forget. You don’t have that luxury.”

It’s a blind shock when Arthur lunges forward, kisses Eames a little awkwardly. 

“Sorry,” Arthur says, gone again half an instant later, backing away, “sorry, I — I don’t know why I did that.”

Eames has the answer to that, has several, actually — vulnerability, forced proximity, Eames’ show of kindness, a half-dozen reasons he should have guessed Arthur would kiss him now — but he doesn’t offer any of them to Arthur. Instead he reaches out and cups the lean blade edge of Arthur’s jaw in the hollow of his palm, holds him steady, leans in and kisses him back. 

It’s probably a shitty thing to do, it’s taking advantage and it’s predatory and it’s everything Cobb shouted at him about, but Arthur is warm and lovely and so beautiful in the soft light.

“Bad idea,” Arthur murmurs against Eames’ lips, not moving away, “I’m so fucking horny right now, you don’t even”—

—“Why on earth didn’t you come to me then?” Eames asks, moving over to kiss Arthur’s neck, his ear. “You know I would be glad to assist with”—

—“Right,” Arthur laughs, tilting his head to give Eames better access, “right, I know you’re dying to put it to the freakshow attraction.”

“I really am,” Eames says, “and if you haven’t sussed out by now that I’m an utter pervert, you’re not half as clever as you think you are.” He moves his hand down Arthur’s stomach, under, finds the hard line of Arthur’s cock through the soft cotton of his pyjama bottoms. “I thought you were angry with me,” he says, “or I’d have done this a lot sooner.”

“Not angry,” Arthur says, gasping, “just — just sure that you wouldn’t — you really want to fuck me when I’m like this?”

Eames chuckles and lifts his head, meets Arthur’s gaze. “The first time I fucked you, you had a pussy and an adam’s apple. Why on earth did you think I’d be put off by a little pregnancy bump?”

“Little?” Arthur says, ready to argue, so Eames strokes his cock and derails his train of thought. Arthur’s no virgin, no, but he’s still very much a teenager, and he reacts to Eames’ touch with flattering immediacy, going flushed about the ears and dropping his lower jaw in a way that would be suggestive if it weren’t so blatantly instinctive. “Fuck, are you — you’re serious, you really?”

Eames, not wanting to put too fine a point on it, lets go for a moment and pushes up at the hem of Arthur’s t-shirt, dragging his fingers instead over the ripe curve of Arthur’s stomach. The first time he laid his hand here, it was with shock; a few minutes ago, with tenderness to answer Arthur’s anger, but now — now it’s with unashamed curiosity, with rising lust. “I made you like this,” he whispers, telling himself as much as Arthur, “it’s me in you, it’s my body in yours. Don’t you think that’s desperately sexy?”

“No,” says Arthur, mouth twisting with humour even as he shivers under Eames’ touch, “no, it’s weird. My belly button is turning inside out. I have a fucking uterus. It’s not sexy.”

“Forgive me for disagreeing,” Eames murmurs, and drops down to his knees, dragging the t-shirt up with both hands now, hooking it up over the swell of Arthur’s middle, baring him. Arthur’s skin looks the same as usual, pale and smooth and young, with a spattering of dark fine hairs closer to the waistband of his pyjama bottoms, but the shape of him is almost obscene, bursting out from his lean form, quite literally a manifestation of Eames having come inside Arthur, having been there, having left part of himself behind. Eames splays his hands flat and drags them down over Arthur’s belly, leans in and kisses the apex of the bump, just under Arthur’s navel at this point. He kisses lower, and lower yet, and Arthur’s hands come up into his hair in encouragement now, Arthur breathing fast and loud enough for Eames to hear over his own breathing, the thudding of his heart. “What about this?” Eames asks now, tugging Arthur’s bottoms down, leaning in to breathe over the wet head of Arthur’s cock, “Is this sexy, then?”

Arthur looks down through heavy dark lashes, licking his lips unselfconsciously. “I can — fuck — I can barely see it, but yeah. Yeah, this qualifies.”

“If you can’t see maybe you’ll last a little longer,” Eames says, which is a little bit mean because it’s a lot true — seventeen might be responsive but it’s also the heyday of hair-trigger orgasms — but Eames makes up for it by not teasing any longer, just gripping Arthur by the hips and taking him down.

Noisy, Arthur’s really fucking noisy. Eames doesn’t mind, of course; okay, more than ‘doesn’t mind’, he gets off on it pretty powerfully. But it makes Eames wonder, when he’s not busy flickering his tongue under the head of Arthur’s cock, or tugging gently at his balls, or sucking kisses against the base of Arthur’s shaft — it makes Eames wonder, what kind of a teenager makes those sounds when they’re fucking? Eames’ grasp of Arthur’s background is tenuous at best — Mal’s whole explanation for him had been ‘he’s so lovely’, and Cobb’s had been more on the ‘don’t fuck him, Eames, I mean it’ note — but surely wherever Arthur comes from, he’s spent as many teeth-gritting hours wanking off in painful silence as any other teenage boy? Whence, then, this gasping moaning boy coming apart under Eames’ mouth and hands, spurting into Eames’ mouth and sighing his pleasure so loudly? 

“Holy fucking shit,” Arthur says, clearly not thinking of much at all for a change, trembling and easing Eames back, his hips snapping forward weakly. He’s still mostly hard — more youth being wasted on the young — but he’s sensitive, clearly needs a moment to recuperate. “You’re really good at that,” Arthur says, panting, grinning, “can you teach me that too?”

Eames rolls back onto his heels and pretends to weigh this request.

“Oh shut up, like you have some problem with me spending hours learning to deep-throat on your dick,” Arthur says, not buying it.

“I’m just wondering, isn’t it a waste of energy down here?” Eames pretends to ponder. “I mean, it’s muscle memory, innit? I would hate to send you back up into the waking world having to start all over.”

“Good point,” Arthur says, pulling up his pyjamas, tugging down his shirt. “You should probably just get yourself off.”

“On second thought,” Eames says, and comes to his feet hurriedly, grabs Arthur by the wrist, pulls his hand to his own straining erection.

Arthur’s mouth goes slanted with amusement. “Mr. Eames,” he says, affecting a startled blink, “did you just put my underaged hand on your grown-up cock?”

“Well spotted,” Eames congratulates him, “now get to work, there’s a good boy.”

* * *

The work of teaching forgery falls by the wayside for the better part of a week in favour of Arthur learning some decidedly less wholesome lessons — but the teaching isn’t all one-sided, as it turns out that Arthur’s obsessive rereading of pregnancy books has earned him a wealth of information on ways to fuck around a baby bump. Arthur’s imagination might be inadequate to conjure a boiled egg but it seems healthy enough when it comes to adapting said sexual positions to account for two cocks instead of one.

“Wish I could think it away,” Arthur says ruefully as Eames kisses his way down the inside of Arthur’s thigh, Eames’ hand holding his leg up in the air while Arthur lies flat on his back. 

“For shame,” Eames says, and pauses over the soft hollow at the very joint of Arthur’s hip, sweet and smelling exactly like Arthur. Sex in dreams can often be vaguely dissatisfying, like reaching for something only to have your fingers close around air, but with Arthur it’s all wonderfully solid, vivid. “How many times must I tell you how beautiful you are, like this?”

A few days ago Arthur might have gone tight-lipped and cool at Eames’ words, but now they elicit a fond half-smile instead. “A few more times?” he says, all flirtation, coy as anything even as he reaches down and palms his cock shamelessly. The underside of Arthur’s belly is glistening faintly with pre-come, and Eames swipes his fingers across the wet spot of skin only to be greeted by a sudden push back from the other side.

“Holy fuck,” Eames says, shocked, staring, pressing his fingers in again gently. The answering ripple of movement is as solid and vivid as every other bit of Arthur.

“Sorry, it — like I said, when I’m lying down, there’s more activity,” Arthur says, embarrassedly, lifting his hips in a little squirming motion.

“That’s bloody incredible,” Eames says, meaning it. “I mean, it’s not you. Well, obviously, it _is_ you, it’s your mind — but you can’t control it consciously?” He pushes in on Arthur’s belly again, and again there’s that rolling pressure rebounding into Eames’ touch.

“Cut it out,” Arthur says, and it’s not clear who he’s talking to as he pushes Eames’ hand out of the way, rubbing his belly and scowling at it.

“Cheeky bugger,” Eames says fondly, wriggling his hand back under Arthur’s. Arthur’s stomach beats a little tattoo under Eames’ palm, in restless opposition to Arthur’s obvious languor. “Does it hurt?”

“No,” says Arthur, “but it’s annoying when you’re trying to sleep, like someone knocking at the door just as you’re drifting off.” As he speaks, his voice loses some of its earlier embarrassment and shifts into something a little softer, more tender. It’s unexpected — Arthur’s been nothing but businesslike about this whole situation, never talking about — about his —

“Is it really a baby in there?” Eames asks, surprised into voicing the thought. “I mean, have you had a look?”

“No, it’s a beagle,” Arthur says, deadpan. “Of course it’s a fucking baby, Eames.”

“I only meant,” Eames says, and gets up from the bed, goes over and opens the closet, wheels out a cart that wasn’t there a moment ago. “Go on, let’s take a peek. I want to know if it has all four legs and a tail.”

“You’re not funny,” Arthur says. “Put that away.”

“No,” Eames says, and takes the tube of jelly stuff they always show in films, squirts it onto Arthur’s belly, flicks some switches on the machine. He notes the labels on the buttons - _on/off_ and _whoosh-whoosh noises_ and _thing that takes pictures_ while Arthur flops around and moans and protests, but all without actually getting up and leaving. There’s a sort of wand thing, and Eames rubs it over Arthur’s skin while they both look at the blue-and-black screen. “Ah, excellent,” says Eames, “we’re having a whole litter of blobs.”

“Give me that,” Arthur snaps, “you’re not doing it —“ and when he touches the machine all the labels change over to scientific and incomprehensible shorthand, and the picture on the screen goes from blobby and confusing to — well. Blobby and confusing, but in better focus. “There,” says Arthur, “see? Only two legs.”

“We’re having a deformed beagle?” Eames asks, pretending to be horrified, still not seeing anything particularly useful.

Arthur sighs and shifts the wand a bit. “Look,” he says, “there’s the head. See the arm?”

Eames leans in and squints at the screen. “It looks like my portrait of you, a bit,” he says, lying. “That’s a very touching tribute.”

Arthur rolls up into a sitting position and moves the wand again, now better able to poke at the monitor. “There,” he says, “that line, see?”

It’s like one of those computer-generated 3D posters from the nineties, because Eames blinks and suddenly — “Oh,” he says. It’s a head. There’s an arm. There’s a charmingly plump belly and there’s an umbilical cord snaking off out of frame. “It’s moving!” he exclaims.

“Well, obviously. It’s alive,” Arthur says dryly, then hesitates. “Sort of.”

“Can you tell if it’s a boy or a girl?” Eames asks, breath caught in his throat, trying to remind himself that this is all a dream, it’s just a —

“Boy,” says Arthur, not bothering to move the wand again. “I — I don’t have to look. I’ve known it’s a boy all along, somehow.”

A boy, a little — a son, a child who somehow belongs to them, to Arthur and Eames both. The idea of it comes over Eames in two distinct and overpowering waves of emotion: first a weird mistrusted joy, and close on its heels a sick apprehension. “Arthur,” says Eames, swallowing, horrified, “what are we going to do with him?”

* * *

It’s a conversation they never quite seem to finish, Arthur always managing to change the subject, to leave the room on the pretence of hunger, or to distract Eames by saying or doing something spectacularly lovely and filthy. Eames falls asleep most nights with one arm hooked around Arthur and the baby, telling himself very sternly that tomorrow is the day, tomorrow they’ll sit down and come up with a firm plan for how to manage the endgame of this whole exercise.

Tomorrow after tomorrow passes by, though, and Eames gets no further ahead in managing the situation. It’s no help, knowing that Mal and Dom will place the blame squarely on Eames’ shoulders should this scenario fail, or land Arthur in yet a worse scrape — Arthur, who is now into what they reckon is his third trimester, whose body doesn’t seem to be managing the awkward ballast of baby as well as it was. Arthur’s uncomfortable and puffy, his balance is off, and he spends more and more time napping instead of snacking or painting or seducing Eames.

“After this you’re giving me a back rub,” Arthur says, sprawled out on his side looking knackered, frowning at the chessboard lying between them on the mattress. “Not the sexy kind.”

“Of course, darling,” Eames says patiently, watching Arthur reach out and move a knight. “I live to serve.”

“And then my feet,” says Arthur, groaning and stretching his long ungainly body with a delightful little arch. 

Eames grins, partly because Arthur is so dear and partly because Arthur’s just made an uncharacteristic strategic error on the chessboard. It takes a moment for Eames to tear his eyes away from Arthur, to direct his focus back to the board. “Check,” he says, and reaches a hand to move his castle. Freezes. Frowns.

“That’s not check,” Arthur says, frowning too.

“It — it was going to be,” Eames says, getting up on one elbow and studying the board. “You — Arthur, your pieces moved around.”

“No, they didn’t,” Arthur says, mirroring Eames’ motion, frowning more deeply. “They — oh my god. They did.”

Eames blinks, reassesses the board. “You undid your last — three moves.”

Arthur shakes his head. “You saw my hand, I didn’t move anything! It must have been you, your mind.”

“No,” Eames half-laughs, giddiness rising, “no, Arthur, this is in your favour, not mine. It had to have been you.” He looks up, grins at Arthur. “You just cheated. With your _brain_.”

“I did?” Arthur asks, baffled, starting to lose his frown. “I — did I?”

“You bloody did,” Eames says, proud. “Arthur, darling, you brilliant thing.”

“I didn’t mean to,” Arthur says, shaking his head, fighting a smile. “I — are you sure?”

“Certain,” Eames says. “That great big brain of yours tried to pull a fast one on me.” He knocks the board off the bed with a sweep of his hand. “Well done, clever lad,” he says, and half-falls onto Arthur as he kisses him in congratulations. “For that, I’ll proceed directly to the backrub,” he says, “shift over.”

“You could start off by rubbing my front,” Arthur says, kissing back, beaming now. “Positive reinforcement and — ah, yeah, Eames.”

* * *

It’s not quite a breakthrough, but it’s at least a crack in the heretofore flawless face of Arthur’s terrifyingly solid internal consistency — and a crack, Eames knows well, is often all that’s needed to break something wide open. Sure enough, Arthur’s prowess at cheating extends quickly into poker, blackjack, even Snakes and Ladders. 

“What was I doing messing about with art,” Eames asks, snorting when one of the snakes on the board wriggles free and relocates itself just under Eames’ game piece. “I should have known your compulsive need to win at everything would be a more powerful force for creativity than anything else.”

Arthur just dimples and slides Eames’ token down the long snake, far away from Arthur’s own at the top of the board.

It’s not long afterwards that Arthur’s newfound logical fluidity starts to manifest itself outside the arena of board and card games. His shirts start changing colour, once a day, then twice, then almost every time Eames looks away. Arthur’s hair is long and floppy one week, and cropped close the next, and somewhere in the middle the week after that. The day Arthur ticks over into his eighth month of pregnancy, he wakes Eames by bounding clumsily onto the bed with a whole bowl full of piping hot boiled eggs.

“It’s the details,” Arthur says, cracking one open and spilling grains of salt all over the bedspread as he eats. “I didn’t realize it was all about the details.”

“The details?” Eames repeats muzzily, still only half awake. “I would have thought that was”—

— “You know,” Arthur says casually, dropping bits of shell everywhere, “the chemical make-up of the shell, the membrane, the denatured protein, the yolk, the pores on the surface, the size and weight and”—

—“Are you mad?” Eames asks, rubbing his eyes. “Even you can’t possibly think of all that at once.”

“Exactly,” says Arthur, “I had to stop trying to hold it all in my head.” He holds up a piece of the shell he’s discarded. “See? Smooth. It doesn’t matter, getting it perfect.”

Eames takes the shell and rubs it between his fingers. It feels right, but up close — Arthur’s right, the shell lacks the fine imperfections of a real waking-world eggshell. It’s too satiny, too sleek. “Learning to love your inner lazy-arse,” Eames says, lifting his eyebrows, impressed. “Well done.”

“If I’d known that’s all there was to it,” Arthur says around a mouthful of egg, but doesn’t finish the sentence, too absorbed in peeling the next egg.

If he’d known, Eames thinks — then what? Eames doesn’t want to ask, because surely if Arthur had worked out a way to unincept himself, he’d have done it already. Variable as their world has suddenly become thanks to Arthur’s mind, the pregnancy is one thing that never alters except to progress. Only — now Eames considers it — Arthur seems less awkward suddenly, the way he’s moving this morning. Is he getting smaller? It doesn’t seem possible, when Eames gives him a once-over, Arthur’s belly seemingly taking over half the bed.

“What do you reckon, time we took another peek at the sprog?” Eames asks, trying to sound friendly and casual, worried that a mention of the ultrasound machine is going to fracture Arthur’s cheery mood.

“No,” Arthur says, sure enough, brow clouding over. “Eames, no.”

“Go on, then,” Eames wheedles, putting on a winning smile, “I just want to look at him.” He slides his hand over, squeezes the inside of Arthur’s thigh. “A peek, hmm?”

“No, I,” Arthur says, and wriggles under Eames’ touch. “Eames, don’t”—

Eames slips his hand up, figuring he might have a better chance if he can get Arthur into a post-coital state of mind — but when he goes to palm Arthur’s cock, it’s nowhere to be found. “Arthur?” he says, startled, freezing, his fingers notched into the disconcerting V at the apex of Arthur’s thigh.

Arthur sighs and rolls away. “It was getting too uncomfortable,” he says, “walking around with a baby’s head bumping into me.” He looks over at Eames. “You know men’s pelvises are shaped really differently, right? They’re narrower and — pointier.”

“So you decided to just pop back into a female version?” Eames asks, shocked.

Arthur shrugs. “It was easier than making boiled eggs, actually. Felt more natural.” He lifts his hips up restlessly, and Eames suddenly can’t help but see the difference there, Arthur a bit broader than usual, a sweet little curve that’s less at odds with the swell of his middle than his narrow male hips had been. “Plus I was having trouble peeing standing up when I couldn’t see my dick anymore.” He looks over at Eames again, a faint flush belying his casual tone. “Please say you still think it’s sexy? I mean, I know it’s not the same as the first time we”—

“I want to see,” Eames says roughly, and tugs down on Arthur’s pyjama bottoms, mouth going dry at the sight of Arthur’s revised body. “Christ,” he breathes, and slides his hand up Arthur’s thigh again, more slowly this time. “You’re so lovely.”

“Mm,” Arthur says softly, and his knees fall apart just as they always do for Eames. “Will you fuck me like this?”

“Always,” Eames says, and means it, “I’ll fuck you any way I can, my dear Arthur.”

Arthur tastes sweeter than last time, more like a woman, and how Arthur could ever have picked up that little bit of knowledge, Eames will never know, but he doesn’t particularly care when Arthur’s holding his head in place and grinding up against Eames’ mouth, hungry and shameless and gorgeous. Eames holds Arthur steady with one hand on Arthur’s belly, and it should be disconcerting to feel their child moving under his palm but it’s not, it’s really not, it’s intimate and breathtaking and Eames doesn’t know if he’ll ever get past his shivery disbelief at the feeling. Arthur comes against Eames’ mouth with an easy rush, and Eames holds up Arthur’s thighs and scrambles closer on the bed, fucks into Arthur’s pussy with sweet little strokes as Arthur grins and gasps and shivers. “It’s so different,” Arthur says, sweaty and flushed and hitching up to bring Eames inside. “I like it, though.”

They fuck, and fuck, and somewhere around the third round Eames remembers he hasn’t eaten today, but he’s not hungry in the least because everything has gone a bit hazy and Arthur’s mouth, the round soft curve of Arthur’s ass in Eames’ palm, the easy slip of Arthur’s pussy clenching around Eames, — they’re all that really matter. “Don’t stop,” Arthur says, pulling Eames’ hand down, pushing it up against his clit. “Never stop fucking me.”

Eames bows his head down, cradles his brow on Arthur’s narrow boyish shoulder, fucks into Arthur and thinks that the little crack in the edifice of Arthur’s logic has really burst open now — except, of course, there’s still that round solid weight of inception between them, that kicking too-real proof that Arthur may have begun to understand forgery, but there is one thing he can’t seem to alter in the slightest.

* * *

Time was ticking like a metronome before, passing in orderly fashion as they parcelled out hours of activity and days of Arthur getting bigger and bigger — but now things are getting messier, and Eames realizes how much of the dream’s solidity had in fact been based on that bastion of stability that is Arthur’s mind. It’s not dangerous, somehow — there are no angry projections, no shaking walls, no lurching shifts in gravity — but it’s unsettling, the number of times Eames looks up from whatever he’s doing — painting, reading, kissing Arthur — and says, “Darling, how did we get here?”

“We’re dreaming, Eames,” Arthur invariably answers. “Check your totem.”

And Eames fumbles for his poker chip, spins it between his fingers, watches it slide into two chips and then back to one. “Does my head in,” he mutters, “been under too long.”

“Try having a fetus,” Arthur will return, rolling a red weighted die from palm to palm. “Try having Braxton-Hicks contractions.”

“What week?” Eames asks, some length of days or hours later. “What week is it again?”

Arthur always knows. “Thirty-four,” he says, leaning over the side of the couch and coming back with a plate of pancakes.

“Thirty-four already?” Eames asks, startled. “Christ!” He takes a pancake between his thumb and forefinger, bites at the perfect circle of it. Texture is right, flavour is good, but the pancake is so evenly browned it seems like it must be a foam prop. “Arthur, we do need to talk about the, the adoption. It’s terribly important.”

“Mm,” agrees Arthur, “yeah, I could go into labour any,” and he clicks the telly on. “Oh hey, Teen Wolf is on.”

Eames eats round and round the margin of his pancake, concentric pancake circles, and when he’s done he rubs Arthur’s swollen feet and wonders why it is that he didn’t remember Justin Bieber being in Teen Wolf.

* * *

The sex has changed, too, and not just because Arthur’s equipment has been inverted. It’s lost its edge of reality, which is good in a way, but confusing too. In the backwards way of dreaming, Eames seems to discover things after he’s already face-to-face with them.

“Oh,” he says now, breaking the gentle suction of his lips, lifting his head up and blinking stupidly at Arthur. “You have breasts.”

“Oh yeah,” says Arthur in a sort of dazed tone of surprise. His hand moves down and cups the breast Eames had been kissing. “It feels good, you doing that. They’re sort of sore.”

Eames flicks a thumb over the dark heavy nipple, fascinated by the firmness of Arthur’s breasts, not sure if it’s because he’s young and hard-bodied or if it’s something to do with the baby. “Which parts of you are still Arthur, then?” he asks.

“All of me,” Arthur says, laughing, stroking the back of Eames’ neck to urge him back down. “Don’t be an idiot, it’s all me, still.” His laughter breaks on a sigh as Eames lowers his mouth and sucks again, and Eames shifts his fingers inside Arthur’s pussy and feels their baby turning in slow motion under Arthur’s tight-stretched skin, Eames’ skin to Arthur’s.

* * *

“Yahtzee,” says Arthur, and scoops up a handful of rubber snakes.

“This isn’t how you play Yahtzee,” Eames warns him. This seems very significant, suddenly.

“I win!” Arthur crows. “Your turn to feed the giraffes.”

* * *

“Thirty-seven,” says Arthur, next time Eames remembers to ask. “No, shut up, I have to show you this,” and Arthur takes Eames by the fingers and opens a door to the pantry except it opens to a flight of stairs going up up up and this house only ever had the one storey except for how there are two. “Come on,” says Arthur, “we’re going to be late.”

“Thirty-seven,” says Eames, following Arthur up. “Thirty-seven sounds like a lot.”

“It’s still three weeks to the kick,” Arthur reminds him. “Check your totem, Eames.”

“Right,” says Eames, and they open the door at the top of the stairs and it’s sunshiny and brilliant and California up here. “We should stay up here,” he says, “it’ll be much easier to feed the giraffes from the windows on the top floor.”

“That’s what I was thinking,” says Arthur, whose hair is soft and shiny and clubbed back into a short tail, who is wearing small silver earrings and just a hint of lip gloss, and who grins dimples at Eames as she turns around in the sunshine, amazingly light on her feet given the size of her belly. “Come on, there’s a kitchen through here, I’m starving.”

“There’s something important,” Eames reminds Arthur, “about the adoption. We need to talk.”

But Arthur is already gone, down the corridor and into the kitchen presumably, and Eames feels worried for a minute and then he remembers it’s his turn to feed the giraffes, and he goes to find some leaves.

* * *

“Forty,” Arthur says, “motherfucking goddamn forty, Eames,” and Eames jams his fingers into his hair and tries to remember how to breathe, because somehow time has squeezed its fingers tight round them again and it’s weird as hell, standing in the bedroom in the second storey of the house and being suddenly aware that there is no second storey, and therefore no bedroom, and has Eames really been letting Arthur win Yahtzee with rubber snakes?

“Not,” Arthur says, gasping, “not really important right now.”

“I’m just saying,” Eames says, tensely, “let the record show you’re a bloody cheater.” He looks round the bedroom for clues as to what he’s supposed to be doing, but it’s no good. Eames is in the middle of the carpet and he’s wearing normal clothes, trousers and a button-up shirt with the sleeves rolled up to the elbow. His totem is heavy in his right front trouser pocket, where he always keeps it. He’s got nothing in his hands but locks of his own hair, yanked taut as he holds tight.

Arthur is on the bed, or her forehead is — _his_ forehead, Eames corrects himself, Arthur’s a _man_ , or he should be, used to be. Right now Arthur’s forehead is on the bed, anyway, and the rest of him is bent over, palms braced wide against the mattress, t-shirt riding up a little, yoga pants slipping down; Arthur is barefoot and bent over the bed. Normally it might seem sort of sexy but Arthur is gasping and clenching handfuls of duvet, and normally _that_ might be sexy, except how Eames is nowhere near him and the gasping sounds a little too harsh.

“Oh my god,” says Eames, getting it. “You’re in labour?”

“Very observant of you,” Arthur grinds out, and then he’s slumping down, all the tension suddenly gone like puppet with its strings cut.

“Is that it?” Eames asks, relieved, letting go of his hair. “Is it over?”

Arthur turns his head and glares. “Eames!” he snaps. “I know we’re dreaming but wake up a little, goddammit! I need you to pull it together.”

“Right,” says Eames, “that was just the contraction over with, right.” He comes forward and lays a hand on the small of Arthur’s back. “Do you need to hold my hand and almost break it? And tell me I’m never having sex with you again?”

“It’s not a sit-com,” Arthur says. “Don’t touch me.”

“You’re not supposed to go into labour,” Eames says, realizing it now, lifting his hand away hastily. “Arthur, there’s an obstetrical surgeon, I’ll call him.”

“No,” says Arthur, “no, Eames, I have to — I need to do it this way. That’s why,” and he’s pulling at the duvet again, and it’s killing Eames to keep his hands away now that he’s realized Arthur’s in pain. “That’s why,” Arthur grits out. “It’s okay, I have to,” he says, and Eames can’t begin to understand anything Arthur’s thinking except that Eames’ job now is to shut up and follow orders.

Arthur’s right, it’s nothing like sit-coms. He doesn’t seem to want to squeeze Eames’ hand or curse his name; for long hours all he wants to do is lean his forehead on the bed and moan through each contraction. It’s gruelling and endless and Eames’ only contribution to the whole thing is to open the door for the midwife projection Arthur seems to have conjured. She chivvies Arthur to his feet at last, gets Eames to hold him up firmly, to walk him around the room in circles with long pauses for the horrible grinding contractions. It’s Eames’ dream, but the world clenches hard when Arthur’s in pain, like a pressure wave swooping in from all sides. Arthur’s sweat-soaked and shaky, yet he keeps walking, barely able to talk. 

_Labour_ , Eames understands suddenly, is not a euphemism. Arthur’s body is working incredibly hard.

“This sucks,” Arthur says, at one point, turning to grip Eames by both shoulders, clutching him a little desperately. “Eames, this really really sucks.”

“Shh, darling,” Eames says, “you’re amazing, you’re strong as a bear, look at you.”

“I changed my mind,” Arthur says, shaking his head, breath coming fast. “I changed my mind, I want the surgeon.”

“That’s transition talking,” says the midwife soothingly, who is in turn Arthur’s subconscious talking, which means of course that Arthur doesn’t mean it, really. “It’s the worst right before it’s time to push, it’s a good sign.”

Arthur drops his forehead to Eames’ shoulder and makes a pitiful sound, and Eames’ heart is breaking, he wants more than anything to take this pain from Arthur, to make it stop. Arthur’s very strong and very determined but he’s so young, and he — he can’t — Eames resolves to deal with Arthur’s wrath later, if necessary — he’s done, he’s calling the surgeon, this is bloody well it.

“I need to push,” Arthur says abruptly, just as Eames digs in his pocket for his mobile. “Eames, I need to push.”

The midwife helps Eames get Arthur over to the shallow pool in the corner, the one that wasn’t there a few minutes ago, and together they get Arthur out of his yoga pants and down into the warm water, and Eames is wading in fully clothed but he doesn’t even care because it seems like something is about to happen and Arthur is clearly past his earlier flash of despair and into something like his usual focus and determination, unfamiliar though his female face may be.

“Okay, dad,” says the midwife, once she’s done with whatever mysterious things she needs to check between Arthur’s legs, “your baby’s almost here, you’re going to help deliver him.”

“Not me,” Eames disavows hastily.

“Can’t drop him, he’s underwater,” she says, brooking no nonsense, and Eames again has to remind himself that this is some quieter part of Arthur’s mind giving the orders. “Go on, I’ll tell you what to do.”

Arthur himself has gone silent and businesslike, holding the sides of the tub and bracing himself with knees splayed. The pressure wave comes over the room again but it’s less like a squeeze now and more like a —

“Push, that’s it,” says the midwife, “push, come on, go go go. Yes, good job, good, breathe.”

“Are you really bloody doing this?” Eames asks, amazed, sloshing forwards and getting a good grip on Arthur’s knee, heart racing. “Arthur, you — how are you”—

“Again, there’s a good girl,” says the midwife, who doesn’t really seem to care if Arthur’s actually not a girl at all, and Eames isn’t sure he can blame her, seeing as Arthur’s currently doing a pretty exclusively female thing, namely pushing a newborn out into the world. “Go, push,” she chants, and Eames holds his breath and resists the urge to push, too.

This goes on longer than Eames expected, too, the pushing and encouragement and waiting, but Arthur seems well past the point of complaint now and the midwife is visibly pleased with whatever Arthur is doing. “Here,” she says, taking Eames by the wrist, “this time when she pushes, keep your hand here.” She pulls Eames’ hand between Arthur’s legs, Arthur bears down, and something hard is suddenly pressing against Eames’ fingers. “There he is,” she says, “push, push, push.”

“There’s a fucking head down here,” Eames tells Arthur urgently. “It has a head.”

“Good,” Arthur grits out, first word in long minutes, and pushes harder.

It goes lightning fast then, or so it seems. Arthur makes a wretched sound, the head pops out, and Eames is cradling their baby while the midwife coaxes Arthur to wait a moment, wait wait, and she eases one shoulder out, the other, and Arthur pushes again and Eames catches the rest of the baby, heavy and bigger than seems likely except Eames just saw it happen, and then Eames is lifting the baby from the water with shaking hands and the midwife pops a finger into its — _his_ — open indignant mouth, and then there’s such a flurry of bleating furious cries while Arthur wraps his arms around the tiny slippery-red-white body and laughs.

“Eames,” says Arthur, jubilant, “look at what we did.”

“You did it, darling,” Eames insists, stunned. “Arthur, he’s gorgeous.”

He’s not gorgeous in the least — he’s wrinkly and has scrawny froggish legs and squinty puffy eyes and very little hair — but he’s the most amazing thing Eames has ever seen. “It’s all about the details,” Arthur says, kissing the baby’s ear, his head. “Look at the details, Eames.”

Eames looks and looks, thinking that this was where all Arthur’s focus has gone the last several weeks, everything in Arthur’s mind working furiously to create this noisy live miracle. “He’s fantastic,” Eames says quietly, splashing down a little clumsily next to Arthur, getting an arm round Arthur, leaning in close for a look. “He’s amazing.”

“He is,” Arthur agrees, voice low and smooth and pleased, and in that moment Eames realizes that Arthur is himself again, entirely himself, soaking wet and naked from the waist down and still shaking with the effort of giving birth, but slender and male and seventeen again. “Can you help us over to the bed?”

“Of course,” Eames says, and the three of them are alone, the midwife having vanished when her job ended. Eames tucks Arthur up in the bed, towels him down, finds a blanket and wraps the baby up in it. Eames isn’t sure how long they lie there, Eames holding Arthur, Arthur holding the baby, but it’s not the weird timelessness that characterized the last several weeks of the dream. It’s something else, something new, a breathless suspension of reality. “Arthur,” Eames says, very quietly, when he can’t ignore it any longer. “I know you can hear it too.”

“Yeah,” Arthur says, stroking the round soft cheek again, “yeah, I can.” The music has been growing steadily louder. The kick is coming.

“It’s time to go,” Eames says, and he’s half-expecting Arthur to argue, but Arthur just nods and the bedroom door opens, and in walks —

Arthur.

Not Arthur.

The woman Arthur had become, these last several weeks, perfect in every detail, down to the dimples and the little silver earrings. She’s not alone, either; she’s accompanied by a pretty blonde woman Eames recognizes as one of his own finer forgeries.

“Take care of him,” Arthur says, as his other self reaches down and gently takes the baby from them. “Please.”

“You know we will,” says the other Arthur, the woman. “He’s ours, too.”

“I know, I know,” Arthur says a little brokenly, and his fingers slip away from the tail of the blanket just as the kick comes for them, and Eames is still reaching out to tuck the blanket back up, safe and snug, when they’re jolted out of the room.

* * *

They ride so quickly up through the next level that Eames doesn’t have a chance to clock the hotel room where Dom’s spent what must have been a long boring week by himself. He blinks and they’re in the Cobbs’ living room, complete with Mal. Eames is flipping his poker chip over his fingers before he’s even sitting upright, heart pounding, head aching.

“Did it work?” Mal asks, smiling eagerly.

“Yes,” says Arthur, always the first awake, halfway across the room as usual, tall and steady on his feet and serious as he pops his die back into his jeans pocket. “It’s done.”

Eames tucks his totem away too, exchanges a quick look with Cobb, nodding.

“I’m starving,” says Arthur, exactly like he did a hundred times in the dream. “It was stupid to go under before breakfast.” He’s off to the kitchen before anyone else can speak.

“Twenty weeks of that?” Mal checks, amused, waggling her eyebrows at Eames. “You must need a drink.”

“I,” Eames says, feeling at once like his insides have been scooped out of him. It wasn’t real, any of it, he reminds himself, and for Mal only a few hours have passed; she still thinks it’s terribly funny, probably. “I think I,” Eames tries again, and gets to his feet. “Jet lag,” he says, “I need a proper kip.”

He’s only just gained the guest room when he sees Arthur’s things spilling out of a suitcase and realizes, of course, that Arthur’s the one sleeping here, he’s the guest at the moment. Eames hesitates and then crashes onto the bed anyway, knowing from experience that a few hours’ worth of natural dreaming do wonders to put somnacin dreams to rest, where they belong.

* * *

“Mm,” says Eames, when he becomes aware of Arthur clambering in next to him, “hello, darling.” Eames’ hand grips the front of Arthur’s t-shirt as he pulls him in close, dips down to splay his palm wide over — nothing. Just Arthur’s flat male stomach.

Arthur lays his fingers over Eames’, trapping him there even as Eames instinctively tries to pull his hand away. “It was a dream,” he murmurs, wriggling into Eames’ warmth. “It was just a dream.”

* * *

“It was clever, how you worked it out, though,” Eames tells Arthur quietly when they’re awake again, and both unwilling to get up and face the Cobbs, lying face to face in the narrow guest bed, listening to the alarm clock ticking softly. “So that we were the ones adopting him.”

“I didn’t really think it through, exactly,” Arthur admits, “but I guess my subconscious figured it out anyway.” He pulls a little at the collar of Eames’ shirt. “Cobb’s going to shit a brick if he finds us here like this.”

“Cobb can shit an entire brick factory if he wants,” Eames says, dipping his chin to kiss Arthur’s fingertips. “He can shit Stonehenge. We’re going through something.”

“We’re not, really,” Arthur asserts, but he lets Eames kiss his fingers anyway. “It was just a really weird dream. It’ll fade. Dreams do.”

“You’re so lovely,” Eames says, pausing to gaze at Arthur. “Do you know how lovely you are?”

“You sound like such a dirty old man,” Arthur says, grinning. “Next you’ll say I have pretty hair.”

“You do have pretty hair,” Eames insists, grinning back, moving in to kiss Arthur’s forehead, getting the very margin of Arthur’s hairline, going still with a sudden vivid memory of brushing lips against soft downy hair and milk-soft skin. “Fuck.” He drops back, sinking into his pillow. “We should have named him, at least.”

“We did,” Arthur answers, and hesitates. “I did, anyway.”

“Did you?” Eames asks, surprised. “What did — what is it?”

Arthur’s mouth turns down at the corner, and his voice is very quiet and low when he speaks. “Jacob. It means supplanter. Seemed apropos.”

“Inception has a name,” says Eames, wonderingly. “He was really fantastic, though, Arthur. I mean, you saw his little fingernails?”

“Yeah,” says Arthur, “and he had your nose.”

“Jacob,” says Eames with a small sigh, and kisses Arthur’s mouth, twice. “That’s nice, I’ll remember that.”

* * *

When next Eames awakes, Arthur’s gone and the day is fading fast. Eames’ stomach is a gnawing pit of hunger. He jams socks on over his bare feet, finds his shirt on the floor, and hurries down the stairs chasing the tantalizing smell of one of Mal’s stir-fry dishes. “Must eat,” he tells her, finding her amidst clouds of aromatic steam.

“No wonder, you slept the day away,” she tells him, and takes a little sideways step, and for a moment the curve of her middle is so familiar and dear that Eames can’t breathe, and then the thought melts away and Eames is back to craning his neck to see into the wok, to see if those are shrimp curled tight and pink among all the ribbons of bell pepper and onion.

“Terrible for my cholesterol,” Eames tuts, and snags a shrimp with bare fingers before Mal can stop him.

“Yes, old men of twenty-four need to be very concerned about such things,” Mal says, slapping the back of his hand with a spoon.

“Twenty-seven,” Eames corrects her around the scalding hot mouthful. “God, this is delicious. Why aren’t Cobb and Arthur in here drooling too?”

“They’re under,” Mal says, “working on something Dom thought up while he was killing time waiting for you two.”

“They’re under?” Eames repeats, eyebrows flying up. He doesn’t think anyone could coax him near a PASIV at the moment, not for anything. Then again, he reasons, he really can’t question Arthur’s personal strength at this point, having seen him pass a human into the world.

“Just for ten minutes,” she says. “They’ll be back before dinner.” She slaps Eames’ hand again. “Stop eating everything.”

“I can’t help it, it’s just so bloody good and real,” Eames says. “I’ll die a happy man if I never see another boiled egg.” He elaborates when Mal shoots him a curious look. “Pregnancy cravings. He was like a madman.”

“Hmm,” Mal says, amused, distracted. “Are you staying for Christmas, then?”

“No,” says Eames, though he hadn’t really thought it over. “No, I’d best be gone, I reckon.”

“I had a talk with Dom,” Mal says, clattering a handful of serving spoons from a drawer. “I told him, Arthur’s nearly eighteen now. He needs to loosen the apron strings a little.”

“It’s not that,” Eames says, taking advantage of Mal’s distraction to pick out another couple of shrimp. “It’s not just that, anyway. I mean, we shagged like mad down there, of course, but — I think we probably both need to put a little distance between us now. Arthur won’t want me hanging round.”

“Arthur could do with a little more of people hanging round him,” Mal says, “if you want my opinion. He’s had enough of everyone walking away, I think.”

Eames opens his mouth to ask what Mal means by this, but they’re interrupted by the sound of Cobb and Arthur stirring in the other room, talking in low clipped matter-of-fact tones about whatever experiment they’d been running.

“Dinner,” Mal calls to them, and hands Eames a stack of plates. “Set the table, there’s a good boy.”

They’re all too hungry to talk much the first few minutes. Eames’ plate is half-cleared before he looks up and catches Arthur’s eye across the table. “It’s fine, then?” he checks. “All is well in dreamland?”

“Yeah,” says Arthur with a terse nod, “no, back to normal.”

“Almost back to normal,” Cobb corrects him. “Seems like Arthur picked up a few tricks from you,” he says, arching an eyebrow at Eames.

“Arthur, he’s a married man,” Eames says, pretending shock and dismay.

“Gross, Eames, he means the forgery,” Arthur says, working against a smile anyway, especially when he looks over and sees Cobb’s horrified expression.

“Eames was just saying he’d stay for Christmas,” Mal lies cheerily, changing the subject.

“Stay on the couch,” Cobb appends darkly. “Padlocked to the couch.”

* * *

Cobb doesn’t, in the end, padlock Eames to the couch, but it would hardly matter if he had because Arthur comes to him.

“Can’t sleep,” Arthur says, and drops down half onto Eames, blocking Eames’ view of the telly. “Oh god, yes, something I haven’t seen.”

“You’re horrible,” Eames says, and gathers Arthur in, stops himself from reminding Arthur he shouldn’t be lying on his right side like this, left is better for the circulation, and Arthur curls back into Eames like a cat. Before the inception, Eames thinks he probably would have shooed Arthur away now, and he can’t make up his mind if this is a habit or a concession or some combination of the two — or maybe neither, because while it’s definitely not platonic between them, it’s hardly sexual at the moment either, Arthur treating Eames like an enormous cushion and Eames fighting warring urges to complain and to keep Arthur close forever. “Have you tried drawing again?” he asks, after a while.

“Yeah, I’m surprised how much I retained,” Arthur says absently. “Thanks for all that.”

“S’nothing,” Eames demurs, distracted by the awful late night movie.

“No,” Arthur says, gently jabbing an elbow back into Eames, drawing his attention. “Thank you.” It’s clear he’s not talking about the drawing anymore.

Eames doesn’t know how to answer this; technically, the whole thing was squarely Eames’ fault, rising from Eames’ weak will and general lack of propriety. He couldn’t have known that Arthur’s mind would take five minutes of dreaming and turn it into — but it doesn’t erase the fact that Eames is the one at fault. And yet, Arthur’s thanking _him_ , like Eames did something terribly helpful rather than disastrously stupid. 

Not disastrous, Eames revises abruptly, remembering. No, not disastrous, not in the end.

“Does it feel far away for you, yet?” Eames asks.

Arthur shifts minutely, and for a moment it seems like he might ignore Eames’ question, but then he grabs Eames’ forearm and squeezes it. “Sort of. Not far away enough.” He sighs shortly. “Too far away. I don’t even know.”

“We could go back,” Eames says, nodding over at the inert PASIV.

“No,” says Arthur, “you know we can’t,” because he might be only seventeen but he’s the stronger one anyway, the smarter one.

“I know,” Eames says.

They take turns dozing, now and then. Eames’ dreams are mercifully brief and have nothing to do with the little house in not-England, the second storey bedroom, Arthur peeling egg after egg.

* * *

They have Christmas together, forced merriment and too much rum and wine, turkey until Eames is ready to burst, and then sweets until he swears he really will. They pass round gifts — Arthur’s gotten books for everyone, and everyone’s gotten books for him. Eames doesn’t get or receive anything, being the unanticipated guest, though Mal makes a token effort and gives him a new box of IV supplies, sterilized and still sealed.

“Thanks,” says Eames, lifting the box up in a toast to her, smiling, “because it’s so hard to find intravenous drug supplies on the black market.”

“Yes, but these ones have those purple caps you like,” Mal points out, unbothered.

That night after Mal and Cobb have gone up to bed, Eames and Arthur have sex on the couch. It’s over sort of quickly, by dream standards anyway; Arthur, it turns out, _can_ be quiet if he tries, and for someone whose self-confidence usually borders on arrogance, he’s kind of touchingly worried about upsetting Mal and Cobb, hurrying Eames back into his clothes afterwards. “We probably shouldn’t have done that,” he says, biting his lip.

“How times have changed,” Eames answers, amused. “That used to be my line, darling.”

“No, I mean,” Arthur says, “with me leaving tomorrow.”

“With you what?” Eames asks, blinking.

“It’s Christmas, Eames,” Arthur says, a little grouchily, “don’t you think I might have someplace else to be?”

“I thought you were, you know, an orphan,” Eames says awkwardly. “And Mal and Cobb welcomed your little lonely heart into their hearth and home and taught you how to love again.”

“Yeah,” Arthur says, rolling his eyes, “and let their pervy criminal friend knock me up. They’re awesome foster parents.” He reaches down and grabs his socks, pulls them on. “No, I’m not a fucking orphan. I have parents, and I have to show my face at home at some point this week.”

“So you’re not the product of abuse and neglect?” Eames asks, baffled. “You don’t have daddy issues?”

“I don’t think anyone who grows up with an IQ like mine can claim to have had a normal childhood,” Arthur equivocates, “but no, my dad is fine. He’s an actuary. My mom likes to bake. She’s a graphic designer. I have a little sister, she’s annoying.”

“Mal led me to believe you had abandonment issues,” Eames says, offended now. “She had me picturing you as a tormented wee soul starved for love.”

“Mal thinks everyone’s starved for love,” Arthur says, and then hesitates, looks over at Eames as his expression changes from dismissive to something a little more raw. “She — I guess she’s figured out that my family isn’t the greatest. They — it’s not abuse and neglect. It’s just.” He sighs. “I’d rather be away, given the choice.” He looks away again, goes back to tugging his sock cuff up just so. “You know, you’re barely ten years older than me. I know you like to act like you’re some gross cradle robber but you’re actually just kind of immature.”

“Shut up, you’re immature,” Eames retorts before he realizes that he’s only supporting Arthur’s argument. “I mean, I’m a criminal mastermind and you’re turned on by my amazing competence and dashing devil-may-care ways.”

“More by your mouth,” Arthur says with a little frown. “And your arms. Oh, and the accent.”

“I’m shocked by how shallow you are,” Eames says. “Also, you forgot to mention my arse.”

* * *

So Arthur leaves, and then Eames does, and the dream fades as dreams do, faster than Eames would like and yet not fast enough. He and Arthur never corresponded before, but they do now, little sporadic texts and emails that swing from flirtatious to grouchy to mundane and back over to sexy. Arthur’s vanity is back in full force now that he’s himself again, and Eames gets used to incoming picture messages at all hours: Arthur at his desk scowling, red pen in hand; Arthur holding a new tie up against his face, expression questioning; Arthur, shirtless, grinning a sharp little grin and lying back on his narrow dorm room bed, the camera angle just catching a hint of a glistening wet patch high up on his sternum. _Thinking of you_ , says the accompanying text.

 _You’ll go blind,_ Eames writes back. _Don’t they teach you anything in schools nowadays?_

 _I was excused from that unit, remember?_ Arthur writes back, and then they don’t talk again for two weeks, three.

* * *

Arthur’s work in dreamshare has exclusively been on Cobb’s side of things, which is to say mostly legal: corporate sub-c training, combat scenario modelling, experiments in paradoxical architecture, with only the occasional mindheist thrown in when Mal gets bored or Cobb wants new hardwood on the main floor. Eames knows, logically, that he shouldn’t keep expecting to run into Arthur every time someone mentions a new team member, a new player, a young hotshot American forger, a brilliantly thorough point man. It’s never Arthur that they mean, and if it was, it would be a bad thing. Eames is fairly sure they would compromise a job, the pair of them. Eames’ subconscious has behaved itself just fine every time he’s gone under since the inception but he can’t quite trust it would continue to behave if faced with Arthur in the dreamscape. 

Eames doesn’t fancy explaining how giraffes got into the workplace, or worse yet, a baby who would be about five months old by now.

“He’s really young but everyone says he’s the best,” Kimbala insists, holding the door to the hotel conference room open, waving Eames through. “I think you may know him, he’s apparently worked with the Cobbs a little.”

Catch of breath at the sight of a dark shiny head of hair, a loose-fitting t-shirt on a slender frame, but then the kid turns around and he’s not a kid at all, he’s easily twenty-four, he’s got an atrocious goatee, and his shirt has Strong Bad on it. He could never be Arthur.

It’s a doddle of a job anyway, and Eames kicks off for the day earlier than he should just because he knows Kimbala is too laid back to protest. Kuala Lumpur is steamy hot and lovely. Eames stops off for mooncakes on his way back to the hotel and texts a photo of the bakery’s appalling English signage to Arthur just as he’s strolling through the lobby.

“I’m glad you’re frequenting places that forbid stool on the floor,” says Arthur, standing up from an armchair not five feet from where Eames has paused to check out another incoming text. “Though I’m a bit concerned that they’re okay with it on the sidewalk outside.”

“Moon pie?” Eames asks, holding out the grease-marked white box.

“That shit’s terrible for you,” Arthur says, grinning and coming closer. “Hi.”

“What you doing here?” Eames asks. “Are you on this job with Kimbala?”

“No, I’m not on any job,” Arthur says. “Do you realize you never turn off geolocation on your phone camera’s EXIF data settings?” He holds up his own smartphone. “Google maps. You should be more careful, anyone could be stalking you.”

Eames has no idea what Arthur is on about but he can’t hold back his grin any longer. “Are you stalking me?” he beams.

“Well,” Arthur considers, “I had some free time anyway, term’s over.”

* * *

Arthur eats half the mooncakes after they’re done fucking, lying naked and sweaty and cheerful across Eames’ hotel bed. Eames tries to catch his breath and plucks at his shirt, which is sticking to him in patches because they never quite got it off him in their hurry. He gives up after a moment and starts unbuttoning it, shrugs out of it and flops down on his back next to Arthur. “Oi, leave a crumb for me,” Eames complains idly. “I’m the one that did all the work just now.”

“Right,” Arthur says, “you were the one doing the splits and—“ He stops short, gaze frozen, and Eames realizes too late that Arthur’s looking at Eames’ right shoulder. “What,” he says, not quite asking. “Eames?”

Eames resists the urge to follow Arthur’s gaze, look where he’s looking. Eames knows perfectly well what Arthur’s seeing. “It says ‘proud father’. It’s Italian.”

“I know that,” Arthur says, still wide-eyed, impossible to read. “ _Why_ does it say that?”

“Because I am,” Eames says, simply. “I — I didn’t want to forget that.”

“You’re not a proud father,” Arthur says, a little edgily. “You’re not anyone’s father.”

“I’m Jacob’s father,” Eames answers, as evenly as he can manage. “He might not be with us, but I’m still his father.”

Arthur drops the rest of his mooncake back into the box and pushes himself up into a sitting position. “This is fucked up,” he says, “it’s so incredibly”—

—“Why are you really here?” Eames breaks in, because he thinks he knows the answer.

“I told you, I had a break,” Arthur says evasively. “Where did you put my shirt?”

“So it’s nothing to do with Philippa, then?” Eames pursues. “That’s what they called her, isn’t it? Cobb texted me the news.”

Arthur scrubs a palm over his forehead and his jaw flickers. “I didn’t want to stick around, okay?”

“I wouldn’t either,” Eames agrees wholeheartedly. “Arthur, it’s all right to miss him. I bloody miss him, right?”

“He’s not real,” Arthur says, with markedly less vigour. “And you would have been a terrible parent anyway.”

“I know it,” Eames agrees. “Good show we left him with other, more responsible people, then?” He reaches up and pulls Arthur’s hand gently away from his forehead, brings it to rest on Eames’ chest, over the new tattoo. “Hey, someday we might have a visit, maybe.”

“Not today,” Arthur says. “I don’t want to”—

—“No, not today,” Eames agrees. “Someday.” He squeezes Arthur’s knuckles fondly. “You’re too grown up by half, you know.”

“Only when compared to you,” Arthur says, but a smile is sneaking over his face now. “You realize I’m eighteen now, right? Doesn’t that kill your little jailbait fetish?”

“Nonsense,” says Eames, “you could pass for sixteen if you liked. Very pervy.”

“Gross, Eames,” says Arthur, but he relents at last and falls back down onto the bed, hiding his curving mouth against the side of Eames’ neck.

* * *

_Epilogue_

The Christmas that Arthur is twenty-seven, he and Eames slip upstairs to leave Arthur’s parents squabbling and his horrible little sister whining. In the small bedroom that was Arthur’s growing up, Eames opens the PASIV case and tries to get comfortable on Arthur’s twin bed with all Arthur’s knobby limbs bumping into his own.

“Are you sure?” Eames asks, one last time.

“It’s time we went, finally,” Arthur says, and manages a forced-looking smile, because he knows Eames won’t push the button until he smiles.

The little house in not-England looks broken-in instead of shiny new, now, comfortable and settled into the earth and with a wobbly handrail bordering the cement doorstep. Eames rings the bell and hears shouting within, and the door flies open as though wrenched a little too enthusiastically, and there stands Jacob, tall and skinny with Arthur’s dark shiny hair and Eames’ nose and an expectant look on his face.

“Happy birthday,” Arthur says, because of course there isn’t a need for introductions down here.

“Sorry we’re late,” Eames adds, and pulls Jacob in for a bear hug.

They open an improbably high mound of gifts, eat too much cake, and make small talk with Jacob’s mothers. It’s all less awkward than it should be, and the few times Eames manages to tear his gaze from Jacob and look over at Arthur, he can see that Arthur’s just as transfixed as Eames, watching Jacob’s every move, grinning helplessly at the sight of him so big and strong and happy.

“We’ll come again,” Arthur says, when the music on his bedside clock radio starts to drift into the room. “We’ll be back.”

“You’re here all the time,” Jacob says, wrinkling his nose at this, smiling.

“I know,” Eames says, kissing the part of his hair, “but we’ll be back anyway. We’ll feed the giraffes and let Arthur cheat at Yahtzee, okay?”

“Sure,” says Jacob, and then there’s the kick, and this time Eames doesn’t let go, wakes up with his palm wrapped around the back of Arthur’s head instead.


End file.
